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Most of us identify Lucy Stone with women’s suffrage.
The first woman in Massachusetts to earn a bachelor’s degree (1847, Oberlin College), she became a public lecturer and crusader for equal rights for women. Stone organized conventions, inspired activism, and even mobilized her adversaries.
In addition to Stone, we associate Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton with the movement. Both were inspired by Stone, and became her collaborators.
What few history books tell us, however, is that the coalition formed by these strong, vocal crusaders collapsed in 1869, and the former allies became bitter rivals.
Splintered by what, today, look to be ‘minor’ differences, two factions emerged, and pitted themselves against each other. Each “began publishing their own newspapers, petitioning and fundraising separately, and lobbying legislatures independently.” Historians have noted that the schism led to a duplication of energies in a numerically small, resource-strained movement. The divide “also reinforced stereotypes that women were unfit for political life, encouraging newspapers to focus on the ‘hens at war’ story rather than on that of the great cause itself. Anthony masterminded a plot to poach leaders from Stone’s organization, and the animosity that Anthony and Stanton harbored toward Stone was so intense that they wrote her out of their history of the suffrage movement.” (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Grant and Sandberg, 2017.)
In other words, the women’s suffragette movement became fractured, and almost derailed, by in-fighting over differences (the most prominent of which was Stone’s insistence on linking campaigns for emancipation/ African American voting rights to women’s equality).
Today, over a century and a half later, we witness similar factionalism in the Republican party. Unified by their crusade to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, the GOP is so splintered around particulars that they had to withdraw their proposal before a vote was called. The radical minority faction—the Freedom Caucus—demand nothing short of a wholesale repeal of Obama-care. More moderate members of the party look to compromise, seeking only to strip the law of what they consider its most egregious elements.
This flexibility continues to be anathema to the Freedom Caucus:
“Representative Raul Labrador of Idaho, an opponent of the House bill… said that any Republicans who will not vote to fully repeal the law will not be keeping a promise they made to voters. ‘And they can go back to their districts and explain to the American people why they lied, he said.”
Not unlike the coalition at the heart of the women’s suffrage movement, the Republican party is deeply divided, with an increasingly vitriolic radical element--despite a common goal that should unify them.
GOP in-fighting over Healthcare, no less than the suffragette movement, are examples of what Dartmouth psychologist Judith White has called “horizontal hostility.”
Horizontal hostilities occur between groups whom one would expect to have close affinities. They surface when challenges are made to the status quo. Passionate and extreme, radical groups work hard to build coalitions that will further their cause. Unfortunately, coalitions are inherently unstable, and collaborators often bicker over how best to achieve their common goal. And differences over ‘How’ (not ‘What’) drive them apart. Consider the antipathy that extremists have toward moderates. Confrontational and boasting a 'take no prisoners' mind-set, they have nothing but derision for more tolerant, middle-of-the-road positions. Those who would compromise signal that they have sold out or betrayed the party / cause.
And the betrayal by moderates is more heinous than straightforward opposition to their cause.
This is the key.
‘Differences’ (many of which appear ‘minor’ to those outside the cause) feel like treason to hard-core advocates within any social movement. And, they are aggressively countered. (In a truly ironic twist, secondary considerations—which become attached to the cause through coalition-building—can be assailed by radicals. That is, in an attempt to bring moderates ‘in line,’ extremists can turn to dominant systems of discrimination and oppression to disenfranchise ‘add-on’ issues that are the stuff of compromise).
Given these dynamics, it is hardly a stretch to see how horizontal hostilities are a stepping-stone on the path to institutionalized bullying. If the cause does not fizzle out due to splintering, one or another position becomes dominant. At the point of triumph, the majority will quickly create laws and policies that cement their position, to ensure it is not undermined from below. It is precisely where there is “overlap” that the possibility for “betrayal” is greatest, the need to aggress, the strongest, and the potential for bullying inescapable.
Just ask Lucy Stone.
