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.Sexual assault and mutilation were a part of My Lai.And SandCreek.And Bear River.Thus we might conclude that when we forget rape, that forgettingwill be the seed if its happening again. The crossroads of racism and sexism, Brownmiller concludes, had to be a violent meeting place.There is no use pretending itdoesn t exist (255). Ten Digressions on What s Wrong 251Again: The intersection of sexism and racism was bound to be aviolent place.In what way does my difference with Mae Parry constitute suchan intersection?As a white woman HELPER, shouldn t I simply defer to her?DIGRESSION THE SECONDOne October 1998 day, back from the summer s research inPocatello, I m in the library, looking up a name I ve seen referencedoccasionally in works such as Peter Matthiessen s In the Spirit ofCrazy Horse, but have never seen discussed at any length.Grabbing one moldy, crumbly tome at random, I consult the in-troduction and discover immediately that this white woman writerwas extremely well-known in her day, and vastly influential in thefield of what was known as Indian reform. I load up my book bag and check out the entire shelf.( Pardon all these words about myself, Helen Hunt Jacksononce wrote [Mathes, Letters 136].)Allie Hansen is simply the latest in a long tradition of whitewomen who have concerned themselves with their race s the domi-nating race s treatment of other peoples.And I m just another in along line of women writers.The book considered by many to be thefirst novel written in English, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A TrueHistory, was published in 1688 by the Englishwoman Aphra Behn:spy, playwright, bawdy poetess, and the first recognized professionalwoman writer in English.Her novel describes the cruel murder of anaristocratic, European-featured African in the West Indies.Althoughthis work ostensibly concerns class more than it does race or gender,it seems clear that, right out of the gate, white women writers of En-glish used the novel to explore social power dynamics, particularly ina romantic context.In the eighteenth century, the U.S.Founding Fathers begat, amongother things, a mulish inability to address the evil of slavery.In thenineteenth century, abolition was, to no small degree, of white-womanborn, finding tenacious support in grassroots organizations of upper-class women.Ultimately, our first organized feminist movement wasborn of the abolition movement, when this latter refused to apply equal 252 Conclusions without Endsfervor to suffrage for black men and for all women.Nineteenth-centuryfeminists were effectively divided and conquered by the question ofwhich oppression was primary: that based on race, or that based ongender.Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that all means of oppressionmust be fought together, or none would be truly conquered.Her face does not adorn a dollar coin.That of her partner in activism, the more compromising Susan B.Anthony, once did.Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine (just a bit younger thanme) when she began to write Uncle Tom s Cabin, or, Life among theLowly, inspired by her outrage at The Compromise of 1850 (whichpermitted Utah to be a slave territory), and the inability of her maleleaders to end slavery.Her initial vision for the novel was the imageof Uncle Tom s death: his fervent prayer for his torturers while beingflogged.Intending a short novel, Stowe wrote on and on in serialform, her editor growing anxious about the length (as later criticswould decry the lack of revision), and writing, she said, intoxicatedby the influence of God.Like Behn, Stowe takes a romantic view ofthe murder a martyrdom of the leader of a people less educated than her readers would be; and chewed up the scenery a bit to extractthat audience s sympathy; even as she determined to present a real-istic picture of the horrors of slavery (which she had never witnessedherself).Stowe was not a declared feminist; but, despite complaintsabout the literary worthiness of her novel, literary critics note that,among American woman writers, only Stowe has so thoroughly fu-eled a national cause.President Lincoln greeted her in 1863 the yearof the Bear River Massacre as the little lady who made this bigwar. Interestingly, in her novel, white male characters are frequentlymorally inferior to white women, who are the instigators of much ofthe pro-black action of the plot.In this book, male and female slaves,and white women, are the only people who care about justice.Thanks to recuperative work by Valerie Sherer Mathes and theUniversity of Oklahoma Press, a trip to the library reveals that an-other little lady wrote to fuel a cause.But her cause never caughton quite so strongly.Please pardon a long story.Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (née Fiske) was born October 14,1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, the daughter of Nathan WelbyFiske, a professor of moral philosophy and metaphysics, and his wife, Ten Digressions on What s Wrong 253Deborah Vinal.Both died by the time Jackson was seventeen; the pro-fessor died while on a trip to the Holy Land.She married Edward Bis-sel Hunt, a West Point engineer, who drowned in 1863 (again, the yearof the Bear River Massacre) in the submarine he had designed for theUnion
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