Metaphors of Slavery

It’s fairly rare that I feel that I have something to contribute to a controversy du jour, but I do think that something key is missing in the ongoing discussion of Meryl Streep promoting her new movie by wearing a shirt with an Emmaline Pankhurst quotation that reads “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave.” I admit that when I first saw the images, I did not know the origin of the quote and was, quite frankly, shocked. I immediately slotted the saying right into my current geographic context where a “rebel” has a certain Confederate connotation and “slave” an obviously real, living history. Knowing the quote’s origin only changes the degree to which I think its problematic, however. And no, the full quote doesn’t solve the problem:

Know that women, once convinced that they are doing what is right, that their rebellion is just, will go on, no matter what the difficulties, no matter what the dangers, so long as there is a woman alive to hold up the flag of rebellion. I would rather be a rebel than a slave.

Time Out has defended the shirts by arguing that “The original quote was intended to rouse women to stand up against oppression – it is a rallying cry, and absolutely not intended to criticise those who have no choice but to submit to oppression, or to reference the Confederacy, as some people who saw the quote and photo out of context have surmised.” This defense not only fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between turn-of-the-century white feminists and questions of slavery and race, but also ignores the way that this metaphor has been historically deployed in the first place. The problem is not simply what the words mean now, but what they meant then.

Since at least the eighteenth century, people have used the metaphor of slavery to make claims for a set of political rights even as they ignored the ways race shaped the bodily politic for whom they claimed to speak. Political liberalism itself came out of resistance to people’s “enslavement” to the “tyranny” of monarchy even as it often refused to reckon with slavery itself. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot pointed out in Silencing the Past (1995),

‘Slavery’ was at that time [during the Enlightenment] an easy metaphor, accessible to a large public who knew that the word stood for a number of evils except perhaps the evil of itself. Slavery in the parlance of the philosophers could be whatever was wrong with European rule in Europe and elsewhere. To wit, the same Diderot applauded U.S. revolutionaries for having ‘burned their chains,’ for having ‘refused slavery.’ Never mind that some of them owned slaves. The Marseillaise was also a cry against ‘slavery.’ Mulatto slave owners from the Caribbean told the French Assembly that their status as second-class free men was equivalent to slavery. This metaphorical usage permeated the discourse of various nascent disciplines form philosophy to political economy up to Marx and beyond (85-86).

Trouillot places this usage in the context of the silencing of the Haitian Revolution, but it has a broader effect of erasing the particularities of racial hierarchy, violence, and domination in order to effectively produce a liberal subject that was by default white. Even as the anti-slave trade movement gathered speed, few made the claim that former-slaves deserved full equality or belonged to the same rung of humanity as Europeans. When Pankhurst argues that women were slaves and had to choose to “rebel,” she effaces the history of slavery and imperialism as well as the history of anti-slavery and anti-imperialism in order to advocate for her own admittance to a polity that was, by definition, premised on white supremacy. It makes the claim for gender equality at the expense of racial equality because if upper-class white British women were “slaves,” then what do we call those who actually were? The call to “rebel” in this context is premised on, not incidental to, an assumption about who deserves rights and who does not.

Pankhurst herself, it is worth pointing out, was a fierce advocate of the British Empire. But, then again, is anyone surprised that the promotional tour for a movie about the suffrage movement, written by someone who “didn’t want to make a feminist film” (despite the linked interview making pretty clear that she herself considers herself a feminist) and starring someone who refuses to call herself a feminist, would be clueless about this?