“We Must Not Fail Each Other”: Iola Leroy, Social Media Feminism, and the Politics of Performative Solidarity

Female solidarity has always been aspirational; real in moments, fragile in most, and relentlessly commodified. Today, our cultural landscape is full of pastel Instagram infographics urging women to “fix each other’s crowns” or unite under hashtags like #WomenSupportingWomen, but the reality is far murkier. Frances Harper saw this long before the algorithm did. Iola Leroy exposes the architecture of solidarity: when it thrives, when it fractures, and how systems of race, class, and gender distort even the sincerest attempts at connection.

Harper doesn’t romanticize sisterhood. She interrogates it. When Iola insists that women “must not fail each other” (ch. 12), she frames solidarity not as an instinct but as a demand, a counterforce to the pressures designed to keep women divided. The verb “must” reveals everything: care is compulsory only because the world is invested in making it impossible. Harper’s language here is prescriptive: a call to action inside a world uninterested in women’s collective empowerment.

But the novel also shows how easily solidarity becomes conditional. Iola’s world is riddled with hierarchy; colorism and class shape who is invited into the circle of care and who remains outside its borders. When Harper describes the women who “felt their refinement placed them above certain associations” (ch. 13), she names the rot at the core of performative feminism; the belief that empowerment is deserved only by women who are respectable, palatable, and socially approved. In other words, solidarity is never neutral. It always intersects with power.

The same dynamic defines digital feminism today. A hashtag is easy; a meaningful alliance is not. Online, women curate a version of feminism that demands visibility but not vulnerability. Like the refined women in Harper’s novel, social media performance rewards aesthetic solidarity over accountability. A reposted quote is safer than standing beside a woman whose identity or struggle threatens your social position. Iola Leroy reveals that centuries later, we have simply optimized the performance; the hierarchy remains intact.

This tension becomes even more visible when we place Harper’s novel beside the OAC Women’s Handbook Foreword, a local archival text that policed female behavior at Oregon State a century ago. The Foreword urges women to “observe uniform standards,” so they may live together without “friction.” That language, gentle, orderly, moral, masks a demand that women regulate themselves for the comfort of an institution. Much like Harper’s “refined women,” the handbook enforces a feminine ideal that is compliant, harmonious, and above all, non-threatening.

The phrase “uniform standards” works as an anchor for understanding both texts. Uniformity is the enemy of authentic solidarity. Real connection requires disagreement, complexity, difference; precisely what the handbook discourages and what Harper insists women must embrace to survive. The OAC Foreword teaches women to behave; Harper urges them to resist.

Harper’s insistence that solidarity is a moral duty is radical precisely because it opposes the kind of institutional femininity the Foreword promotes. In Iola Leroy, solidarity grows out of shared wounds, shared struggle, and shared danger…not shared decorum. When Iola offers support to those viewed as socially lower, Harper underscores that real sisterhood is expansive, not exclusive. Solidarity cannot be confined by the borders a system draws around womanhood.

And that’s the problem with hashtag feminism today. It imagines solidarity as a smooth, uniform performance; affirming, aesthetic, uncontroversial. But Harper teaches that solidarity only matters when it crosses boundaries we’re taught not to cross. As she writes, “No work is finished till the weakest is uplifted” (ch. 18). A feminism that uplifts only the already-empowered is not solidarity at all; it’s branding.

So yes, women today are encouraged to support each other, but only in ways that maintain the social order, not disrupt it. Harper calls that bluff. Iola Leroy asks women to choose one another not because it is easy or admired, but because the world depends on us not doing so.

True solidarity is never seamless. Never polite. Never uniform. It is, as Harper shows us, a refusal: a refusal to participate in the hierarchy that benefits from our division.

OAC Foreword