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In looking back
at the re-emergence of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s – the
second
wave of feminism in the United States --
we need to understand that what re-
emerged
was “feminisms,” the plural form of the noun.
Feminist activists from
different
racial and ethnic groups formed organizationally distinct feminist
movements in the
second wave, which were linked in the crowded, competitive social movement
sector. There
were mutual and complicated relationships between feminist activists on
the ground.
To date, case studies of the second wave have all but ignored the
feminism of women of color. Generally, African American feminist
organizing is given a nod in the form of
mention of the National Black Feminist Organization and lamentation
as to why Black women did not join feminist groups in greater numbers (see
Buechler 1990; Echols 1989; Marx Ferree and Hess 1994; Freeman 1975).
Black feminism in these works is seen as emerging later than white
feminism, and as varying a bit from the model of white feminism by calling
attention to the impact of racial oppression in women’s lives.
In the following
discussion, drawn from a larger comparative research project on
the
emergence of feminisms in the 1960s and 1970s,1 I challenge the
idea that Black feminist
organizing was a later variant of so-called mainstream feminism by looking
at two
issues: 1) the timing of Black feminist emergence, and 2) the content of
the Black
feminist
critique of white women’s liberation and the Black Liberation movements.
Black feminist
organizing began roughly when white feminist organizing did.
Scholars have conflated the timing of Black feminist
emergence with the separate analytical problem of the numbers of Black women involved in feminist groups. This
has
led to “model-making,” the implicit (and sometimes explicit) idea that
white feminism -- particularly the “younger,” white women's liberation
branch of second wave feminism (Freeman 1975), was a template that African
American feminists later used for their feminist politics.
Moreover, Black feminist politics contained a strong class critique
of both the white women’s liberation movement and the Black Liberation
movement. Black feminists’
class critique of existing liberation movements was part and parcel of
their feminist emergence, and not solely a reaction to their
marginalization within those movements due to racism and sexism.
Transcending a simple “additive approach” (Spelman 1982) to the
problem of Black women's domination, Black feminists in the second wave
argued against race, gender, and class oppression from the beginning of
their organizing. They formed
a sense of themselves as what I have called the “vanguard center” of
the left. If Black women --
oppressed by the multiplicative (King 1988) systems of gender, race, and
class domination -- were
liberated, that would surely lead to liberation for all.
Thus, liberating Black women was at the core of truly radical
political struggle.
Model-making, the Numbers Game, and the
Timing of Black Feminist Emergence
It is important
to consider the timing of Black feminist emergence to counter the
model-making tendency in the literature on the second wave, which makes
white women's activism a form from which Black feminism “deviates.” For example, Klein noted that while Black women
supported women’s liberation goals more strongly than white women in
survey data, “(most) Black feminists are working outside of mainstream
feminist organizations to create space for discussing the problems facing
Black women” (1987, 27: emphasis added).
Others (Buechler 1990; Freeman 1975; Lewis 1977) have looked at
African American women as being uniquely un-attracted to [white] feminism,
and tried to explain why Black women “failed” to join these so-called
mainstream organizations. This
“numbers game” has obscured not just the feminist elements of Black
women’s activism on behalf of the race (Giddings 1984; Hill Collins
1990; hooks 1981; Omolade 1994), but Black feminist activism itself.
African American
feminists have argued strongly against the model-making of scholarship on
second wave feminisms (Giddings 1984; Hill Collins 1990; hooks 1981, 1984;
Omolade 1994; Smith 1983). They
have argued that a transformative, feminist consciousness was (and is)
inherent both in the activities and the ideology of Black women active on
behalf of their race. These
arguments of the inherently feminist nature of African American women’s
activism in the 1960s and 1970s are certainly persuasive, but so is the
historical record of Black feminist organizing.
Black
feminist organizing began at the same moment that white feminist
organizing did, albeit on a smaller scale.
There were early challenges to male dominance in the Civil Rights
Movement. In 1964, Ruby Doris
Smith Robinson, Casey Hayden, Mary King, Mary Varela, and others began to
discuss women’s status in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). Hayden and King (both
white) wrote an “anonymous” memo to other SNCC members about the
position of women in the movement (Evans 1979). Hayden and King were reluctant to sign their names to the
document, and so speculation as to authorship fell on Smith Robinson, in
part because of her position of authority within SNCC and her propensity
for questioning gender inequities in the organization. Evans reports that, in fact, Smith Robinson was important
enough as a feminist presence that later accounts by white feminists had
her presenting “her” paper herself.
In 1965, Hayden
and King wrote (and signed) a memo, “Sex and Caste,” about women's
status in the New Left. Case
studies of white feminism move from that action to the formation of a
network in November of 1967 by a group of white feminists, self-described
as mostly “of the movement” -- that is, the New Left.
These women published a “Preliminary Statement of Principles”
in New Left Notes, and then went on to publish the first
white women’s liberation newsletter, Voice of the Women’s
Liberation Movement, out of Chicago.
Only months later, in 1968, Francis Beal and other members of
SNCC’s Women’s Caucus formed the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA),
the first self-consciously feminist Black women's social movement
organization of the second wave. TWWA
as a group had an explicitly anti-capitalist critique of the middle-class
style of the Black Liberation movement and of white feminism (TWWA 1971).
In October 1968, MaryAnne Weathers, another TWWA member, argued for
Black women’s liberation in position papers published by TWWA: “An
Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary Force” and
“Black Women and Abortion” (see Weathers 1968a, 1968b).
These papers were widely circulated within both Black and white
movement circles. Earlier
that year, in August, Gwen Patton sent a draft of her essay, “Black
People and the Victorian Ethos,” to Robert and Pam Allen (Allen 1968).
Patton's essay would shortly afterwards appear in Toni Cade
Bambara’s 1970 collection, The Black Woman.
Beal’s
oft-cited manifesto of Black feminism, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and
Female,” was written in 1969, and then published in 1970 in both Sisterhood
is Powerful, Robin Morgan’s edited collection of feminist writings,
and The Black Woman. While
Morgan’s collection is considered a touchstone of second wave feminism,
Cade Bambara’s collection is rarely treated by scholars as a product of
feminist social movement activism, possibly because The Black Woman
includes the voices of Black women skeptical of the need for an autonomous
Black feminist movement. But
many of the pieces in The Black Woman -- in addition to Beal’s
and Patton’s, we could include those by Bond and Perry, Green, Lincoln,
Lindsey, Pat Robinson and (the Mount Vernon/New Rochelle Women’s) Group,
and Toni Cade Bambara herself -- clearly expose and challenge the impact that gender oppression
had on the lives of Black women. In
short, Black feminist activism began when second wave feminist activism
began and was part and parcel of it.
African American women and white women who became feminists became
feminists at just about the same time.
Playing the
“numbers game” has obscured the simultaneity of Black and white
feminist emergence, and the mutual influence that feminist activists
across racial lines had on one another.
Several scholars have noted the impact that Black women in the
Civil Rights Movement had on emergent white feminists as role models;
Evans is especially convincing on this point.
But Black women were not solely proto-feminist role models for
white feminists. Some early Black feminists were involved with political
relationships with early white feminists, and influenced each other's
thinking about the necessity for women’s liberation in whatever context
they found themselves in.
For example, Pat
Robinson, one of the founders of the aforementioned Mount Vernon/New
Rochelle Women’s Group, and the author of several position papers
reprinted in both Cade Bambara’s and Morgan’s collections,
corresponded with Joan Jordan (a.k.a. Vilma Sanchez), a white West Coast
women’s and labor activist, from October 1966 through at least the early
1970s. From their
correspondence, it is clear that the two influenced each other’s
thinking, with Robinson quoting Jordan’s writings on the historical role
of Black women in America, and Jordan’s work clearly drawing from
Robinson’s experience as a practicing psychotherapist (see Robinson
1966, 1971; Jordan 1968). These
kind of contacts between activists mattered very much in the relatively
small network of the Left in the 1960s.
Unless we see Black feminist emergence as simultaneous with white
feminist emergence, we miss the chance to see that second wave feminism
was at its roots the creation of
Black and white women.
By misunderstanding the timing of Black feminist emergence, and
playing the “numbers game” -- i.e.,
worrying why Black feminists did not join “mainstream” feminist groups
-- scholars have missed the chance to map out the different challenges of
movement loyalty and movement repression that Black feminists faced.
Forming the “Vanguard Center,” Part I:
Black Feminism’s Class Critique of White
Women’s Liberation
Black feminist organizations have been
extremely influential in shaping feminist politics.
The phrase, “the intersection of race, class, and gender” is
axiomatic as a touchstone for doing feminist work.
But accounts of how Black feminists arrived at the intersection do
not always show that they were going down all three streets at once from
the very start of the movement. To
a remarkably consistent degree, African American feminists in the second
wave developed what I call the “vanguard center” ideological approach
to feminist activism. Facing
competing demands on their energies from both the Black and white
women’s liberation movements, Black feminists did more than just reject
Black Liberation’s sexism and white feminists’ racism, stepping into a
limbo created by marginalization. Rather, Black feminists were critical not just of sexism and
racism, but of the middle-class assumptions and values that were built
into both movements.
In fact, the Black feminist critique of both sexist Black
Liberation and racist white women’s liberation was in large part a class
critique that posited that each movement’s respective shortcomings were due
to their middle-class blinders.
Black feminist
critiques of “white
middle-class” women's liberation were just that, with the word
“white” seldom appearing without the word “middle-class.”
From the beginning of their movement, Black feminists focused on
the implicit racism of white feminism’s neglect of poor and
working-class women’s issues. This is not to say that Black women did
not see white women as personally racist -- many undoubtedly did because
many undoubtedly were. But Black feminists argued that white women’s
liberation’s neglect of economic survival issues were time and time
again the main stumbling block to joint work between Black and white women
on feminist issues. As one
Black feminist, Lorna Cherot (1970, 16) wrote, “I’ll love you [white
women] when my belly is full, there’s clothes on my back and shelter
over me.”
Given the relative economic power of the Black and white
communities, the Black feminist critique of white feminism’s
middle-class blinders was both race- and class-conscious;
white feminists were perceived as being indifferent to both race and class
issues, and this made working with white women difficult.2
Hunter (1970), while interviewing several Black feminists for The
New York Times, quoted Beal, who told of how white women marching in a
liberation parade in August 1970 had objected to a sign reading “Hands
Off Angela Davis,” failing to see a link between her incarceration and
women’s liberation (see also Giddings 1984, 305).
Many
Black feminists felt that white feminists’ class-unconsciousness was the
key
obstacle to a linked feminist struggle.
Dorothy Pitman, a community organizer and Black
feminist (Cantwell 1971, 183), argued that, “I can’t really say I’m
a sister to white women, unless they recognize how they also were
oppressive in a capitalistic situation.”
Pitman felt that white women needed a class analysis of oppression
in order to understand how their class privilege contributed to the
oppression of Black women. Without such an analysis, Pitman argued, white
women working on their own oppression in a white-dominated racial
hierarchy would be able to do nothing for the liberation of Black women.
Thus,
the racism that Black feminists saw in the white women’s liberation
movement was seen as rooted in white women’s failure to look beyond
their own racial and class experiences.
Davenport (1981, 85-86) wrote that, due to this failure, Black
feminists working with white women are seen in only one of two limited or
oppressive ways: as being white-washed
and therefore sharing all their values, priorities, and goals,
etc.; or if we. . . mention
something particular to the experience of Black wimmin, we are seen as
threatening, hostile, and subversive to their interests.
Barbara and Beverly Smith (1981, 113) characterized their experiences
with the white middle-class
feminist movement in a similar fashion: white feminists were insensitive
to the
experiences of those without racial and class privilege.
The Smith sisters especially challenged some white, middle-class
feminists’ “arrogance” in seeing downward mobility as a measure of
their politics. Material
comfort, the Smith sisters argued, had a very different meaning for Black
women, who had to struggle for it and did not take it for granted.
We can see how
class factored into the Black feminist critique of white feminism by
looking closely at Black and white feminist differences on two issues:
namely, reproductive rights and the family.
In articles that appeared in the Philadelphia women’s liberation
newsletter Women (1970), Black feminists assailed white women’s
failure to acknowledge class/race aspects to abortion.
Abortion on demand -- a key demand of white feminism -- was seen by
Black feminists as imperfect policy because it was not linked to other
reproductive issues that were tied to class power: (1) involuntary
sterilization; (2) life circumstances that compel poor women to abort; and
(3) the possibility that women on welfare would be forced by the state to
have abortions. The
Philadelphia feminists argued that if white feminists really cared about
having an impact in communities of color, they would expand reformist
policies into a commitment to destroy the economic system.
Black feminists
had different perceptions about the meaning of feminist struggles
surrounding the family; awareness of class status, as well as racial
status, played a role in these differences.
The white women's liberation movement was seen as trying to reshape
a family structure that Black women were trying to stabilize (Dubey 1994;
Ferguson 1970). hooks (1984)
noted that white feminists who envisioned the feminist movement leading to
the abolition of the family were seen as a threat by many Black women.
While many white feminists experienced family obligations as exploitation,
most Black women found that the family was the least oppressive
institution in their lives and constituted a refuge from white domination
(White 1984).
hooks (1981)
attributed the anti-family attitudes of some white feminists to their
ability to rely on outside institutions to be cognizant of their needs,
and argued that Black women, poorer as a group, could not rely on such
support. Both hooks and
Morrison (1971) pointed out that class privilege buys one out of the
responsibilities of family; upper- and middle-class women could hire other
(poor, non-white) women to do work for them.
As Lewis (1977) argued, white feminist demands for work privileges
did not resonate strongly with Black women, who had never been excluded
from the privilege of working to support their families.
Looking at Black
and white feminist groups in the second wave -- among them, the Mount
Vernon/New Rochelle Women’s Group -- Polatnik (1996) showed that
motherhood itself had different meanings for Black and white women, in
large part due to class positions. Having
grown up middle-class, many white feminists saw becoming a mother as being
doomed to living a l950s-style suburban housewife role; thus, becoming a
mother meant becoming a victim of sexist oppression.
Coming from less prosperous, more urban backgrounds, Black
feminists knew that alternative mothering styles were possible; in the
Black community, “othermothering,” a more communal style of child
rearing, existed. Thus, Black
feminists did not reject motherhood, but instead argued for choice and
control over motherhood rather than a full retreat.
Forming the “Vanguard Center,” Part II:
Black Feminism’s Class Critique of Black Liberation
Black feminists were equally critical of what
they saw as the middle-class biases of many Black Liberationist groups,
and saw Black Liberation’s sexism as emanating in great part from an
embrace of middle-class values as a means of “fixing” what was wrong
in the Black community. From
the founding of the TWWA in 1968, Black feminists argued against the
“middle-class style” of the Black Liberation movement, along with the
movement’s sexism and masculinism (Giddings 1984; TWWA 1971). Analogous
to their critique of white women’s liberation’s racism, Black
feminists saw Black Liberation’s sexism as rooted in an unexamined
adoption of middle-class white values.
Many Black
Liberationists were committed to socialism, but some segments of the Black
Liberation movement ideologically favored entrepreneurial capitalism
(Cruse 1968), in as much as the Black power solution had African Americans
turning back to the community and emulating other ethnic groups through
self-help (see Carmichael and Hamilton 1967).3
These tendencies were bolstered by the publication of the Moynihan
report in 1967, in which the Black family was painted as deviant, and, in
fact, pathological, in being overly matriarchal.
Many Black Liberationists advocated that the Black family remake
itself along patriarchal, middle-class lines; they urged Black women to
take a step back from public activism into merely supportive roles, or to
go all the way back into the home, away from public life.
Black feminists
countered that the idea of remaking the Black family along patriarchal
lines was classist, foreign to the Black experience, and indicative of a
lack of real revolutionary thinking when it came to the role of women in
society. Black feminists were
highly critical of the Moynihan report itself, but they rejected the
desire of Black Liberationists to restructure the Black family along
middle-class, patriarchal lines. They saw “the myth of the matriarchy”
as a “sledgehammer” being used to stop Black women from effective
organizing (Weathers 1968a, 2), since the report had caused many Black
women to feel that they had to step back from responsibilities, and hand
the reins over to men (Murray 1975).
Many of the
contributors to The Black Woman wrestled with the Moynihan report
and the Black Liberationist “manhood” preoccupation that was
restricting Black women's activism. They explicitly linked the fixation on
“manhood” to the demands of capitalism. Several pieces in The Black
Woman were authored by Patricia Robinson and the Mount Vernon/New
Rochelle Women’s Group (Pat Robinson and Group 1970).
Robinson and her group were critical of Black leaders who they felt
were leading poor Blacks down the garden path of capitalism.
The Mount Vernon/New Rochelle Women’s Group’s analysis of
fighting for Black women linked class, gender, and racial oppression;
fighting these oppressions would require a united front of middle-class
Black and white women who would join poor Black women in continuing to
expose male oppression:
. . . Capitalism is a male supremacist society. . .All domestic and
international political and economic decisions are made by men and
enforced by males. . . Women
have become the largest oppressed group in a dominant, male, aggressive,
capitalistic culture. . . Rebellion by poor black women, the bottom of a
class hierarchy . . . places the question of what kind of society will the
poor black woman demand and struggle for.
Already she demands the right to have birth control, like
middle-class black and white women. . . She allies herself with the
have-nots in the wider world and their revolutionary struggles. . .
Through these steps. . .she has begun to question aggressive male
domination and the class society which enforces it, capitalism.
(1970, 196)
Robinson
faulted her Black militant friends for their class biases, although she
came
from
a middle-class background herself. In
February 1970, she wrote Joan Jordan that Black
militants conflated class oppression with race oppression (Robinson 1970).
Robinson’s socialism impelled her to be friendly to the white women’s
movement from its beginning, and she told Jordan that she thought more
Black middle-class militant women would make alliances with white
feminists, if they were not “too scared to come out honestly for black
women’s liberation.” These
sympathetic Black women did not feel that they had the support to come out
in favor of a Black women’s movement.
In
“Double Jeopardy,” Beal (1970) analyzed the cultural ideal of Black
“manhood” and laid the responsibility for it at the feet of American
capitalism. She argued that
the
construction
of masculinity and femininity was necessitated by the need to sell
products to men and women. The
“typical” middle-class woman, staying home and buying these products,
was not a Black woman, who had historically worked outside the home
(mostly in white, middle-class homes).
Beal argued that
male Black Liberation activists had failed to extend their class analysis
to the position of Black women. She
had sympathy for Black men's suffering in white society, but she argued
that if the Black man had been “emasculated, lynched and brutalized,”
then the Black woman had been “the slave of a slave,” and her dignity
and sexual person-hood had always been as much under assault as the Black
man’s. For Beal, consistent class analysis meant recognizing that
the move to put Black women “back” in the home was futile in the face
of technological advancement: “Black women sitting at home reading
bedtime stories to their children are just not going to make it” (1970,
345). She argued that Black
Liberation needed to purge itself of middle-class ideas about gender
relationships, notions foreign to the Black community, and that Black
women’s groups were needed to steer such a course.
Gwen Patton
(1970) also argued that a failure to apply class critiques to gender roles
was at the root of Black Liberation’s sexism.
Patton wrote that Black Liberation held a “Victorian Philosophy
of Womanhood,” and that Black men failed to realize that capitalism was
responsible for their needing to feel like “men.” Patton felt that Black militants should have been more savvy
about the intent and impact of the Moynihan report, and she chastised
Black male activists for not seeing through it (1970, 146-7):
Black men. . . respond[ed] positively toward Black Power and could
assert their
leadership, which included a strengthening of their masculinity and,
unfortunately, an airing of their egos.
Black women will now take the back position, and in so doing,
Moynihan was justified in his observations.
(A) victory for the capitalistic system!
Black men are now involved with keeping their women in line by
oppressing them more, which means that Black men do not have time to think
about their own oppression. The
camp of potential revolutionaries has been divided.
Patton noted that white feminists had begun the challenge to a male
capitalist order and recommended
that Black women do the same.
Lindsey
(1970, 86-7) agreed that Black militants were being seduced by capitalist
promises.
She argued that the “Black middle class” were
“pseudo-escapees into the
mainstream.”
The escape into the mainstream by the Black middle class meant that
they
assumed
“many of the institutional postures of the oppressor, including the
so-called intact family.” Lindsey
argued that white establishment efforts to “encourage the acquisition of
property among Blacks via Black Capitalism. . . would probably serve to
further intensify the stranglehold on women as property.”
These
contributors to The Black Woman were not alone in their linking of
Black
Liberation’s sexism to a lack of awareness of
class issues. Other Black
feminists writing during this time period echoed the idea that the
masculinists were importing white middle-class values into the heart of
the Black community. Margaret
Wright (1970), a member of the Los Angeles Black women’s liberation
group WAR, declared it impossible for Black families to be shaped like
white ones:
[T]he black man is saying he wants a family structure like the white
man’s.
He’s got to be head of the family and
women have to be submissive and all that
nonsense. Hell the
white woman is already
oppressed in that setup. Black
men have been brainwashed into believing they’ve been emasculated. . .
.Black women aren’t oppressing them.
We’re helping them
get their liberation. It’s
the white man who’s oppressing, not us.
In black women’s liberation
we don’t want to be equal with men, just like in black liberation
we’re not fighting to be equal with the white man.
We’re fighting for the right to be different and not be
punished for it . . . I want the right to be black and me.
Nina Harding, a Black woman writing from a socialist perspective,
lived in Seattle, three thousand miles away from most of the contributors
to The Black Woman. In
1970, Harding wrote a position paper entitled “The Interconnection
Between the Black Struggle and the Woman Question” (presented at the
Seattle Radical Women Annual Conference in February 1970).
She agreed that Black Liberation, otherwise in part critical of
capitalism, had accepted traditional ideas about women's roles:
Where the Black man asserts to reject the values and mores of this
capitalistic
system. . . when it comes to the woman question, he imposes and demands
that
all Black women resume a subservient role and maintain the feminine
qualities of what
he considers to be lady-like. Black
men have even alleged that Black women have aligned with society to
persecute and emasculate their manhood.
As a consequence Black men DEMAND that Black women step back
because the Black women hamper the leadership of the Black man within the
struggle for liberation of all peoples.
Harding (1970, 2) was critical of Black “bourgeois sisters and
silent sisters,” who hold to “WASP standards, be those standards
interpreted by the Muslim or Nationalist advocates.”
For Harding, the Black struggle would not succeed as long as it
adhered to white middle-class family models.4
Black feminists critiqued middle-class biases even when it seemed
that issues were purely those of gender.
For example, Black feminists challenged Black Liberationists’
assertion that birth control was “genocide,” arguing that charges of
genocide took away poor Black women's right to control their lives.
Black Liberationists urged Black women to have children to thwart
dominant white society; the racism present in some family planning groups
made this stance viable (Ross 1993).5 At
times, Black militants took action to back up their assertions.
In 1969, Black nationalists closed down a birth control clinic in
Pittsburgh, which was subsequently reopened by community women (Lindsey
1970). Ross (1993, 153)
reports that other birth control clinics were
invaded by Black Muslims
associated with the Nation of Islam, who published cartoons in Muhammed
Speaks that depicted bottles of birth control pills marked with a
skull and crossbones, or graves of unborn Black infants.
Cade Bambara (1970b), Weathers (1968b), and the Mount Vernon/New
Rochelle Women’s Group (see Black Women’s Liberation Group 1970)
argued that abandoning birth control would deprive Black women of much
needed control, and dismissed the idea that any use of birth control by
Black women whatsoever constituted “genocide.”
A well-known statement, “Poor Black Women,” expressing the view
that birth control for Black women was about control and not genocide,
came from The Mount Vernon/New Rochelle Women’s Group.
Patricia Robinson and her co-authors had formulated the statement
by September 1968 (Robinson, et al. 1968).
They wrote in direct response to Black militant groups that opposed
the use of birth control by Black women.6
In “Poor Black Women,” Robinson and the Mount Vernon/New
Rochelle activists argued that the Pill gave “poor Black sisters” the
ability to resist oppression, whereas trading control for a life of
domesticity would result in caving into white middle-class domination.
More pointedly, the authors of the statement accused the anti-birth
control Black militants of being “a bunch of little middle-class
people” with no understanding of the Black poor:
The middle-class never understands the poor because they always need to
use as you want to use poor black women’s children to gain power for
yourself. You’ll run the
black community with your kind of black power --
you on top! The poor understand class struggle!
(Robinson, et al. 1968, no page given)
In summary, Black feminists responded negatively to the traditional
gender ideology that Black Liberationists espoused.
They posited that the sexism generated by the Black Liberation’s
adoption of middle-class values was alien to the Black community. Black
feminists consistently blamed sexism on capitalism, and linked struggles
against sexism to struggles for economic justice.
As the 1970s progressed, Black feminist organizations like the
National Black Feminist Organization and the Combahee River Collective
would add an analysis of the limiting impact of heterosexism on Black
women’s lives. The
understanding of how feminist activism had to take charge of fighting
against intersecting, multiplicative oppressions was therefore a Black
feminist legacy that could be expanded to reach out to more and more
women. The vanguard center could grow.
Conclusion
By
the mid-1970s, Black feminism had profoundly influenced the entire
feminist movement. The vanguard center’s critique of interlocking
oppressions strongly influenced feminist theory, and continued to do so
throughout the 1980s and l990s (Hill Collins 1990; hooks 1984; Johnson
Reagon 1983; Joseph and Lewis 1981; King 1988; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981,
Spelman 1982; Smith 1979; White 1984).
Whatever problems remain in feminist practice, Black feminists
succeeded in bringing their concerns to the center of feminist activism.
From the
standpoint of chronology and ideology, Black feminism is at the center of
the story of second wave feminism. It
is a myth that Black women were hostile to feminism, as polls done during
the era show; the 1972 Louis Harris\Virginia Slims poll showed that there
was, in fact, greater support for feminist goals and ideas among Black
women than among whites in the public at large (Lockwood Carden 1974;
Freeman 1975). Black
feminists began their struggle at the same time white feminists did; they
are absent from the story of feminism’s emergence by virtue of the fact
that they did not join white women's liberation groups in large numbers.
If the impact of
a social movement is solely a matter of numbers -- if success and
influence are gauged solely on this basis -- scholars of the second wave
may be justified in choosing to see Black feminism as marginal to the
story of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.
But, just as importantly, the legacy of feminist activism consists
of political ideas that last -- ideas that clarify the position of
different groups of women in this society and that motivate further
activism. By these
criteria, the Black feminist contribution was central to the success of
second wave feminism, and telling the story of Black feminism needs to be
part and parcel of telling the story of the second wave.
Notes
1
The project, “On Their Own and For Their Own:
African American, Chicana and White Feminist Emergence in the 1960s and
1970s,” is a historical and sociological look at the structural,
intra-movement and inter-movement dynamics that led to the emergence of
feminist movements organized along racial/ethnic lines in the second wave.
2
White socialist feminist groups, like Boston’s
Bread and Roses, did have an anti-capitalist critique of sexism from the
late 1960s on. It is probably
true that these socialist feminist groups were initially distant from
Black feminist networks; later, Black feminist groups like the Combahee
River Collective had members with specific links to white
socialist-feminist organizations (Combahee River Collective 1981).
3 Black feminists had a more complicated relationship with the
avowedly socialist
Panthers. The Panthers were known for having strong women
leaders; at the same time, the masculinism of much of the male leadership
made women's lives within the Party difficult. See Brown (1992); Newton
(1970); “Panther Sisters on Women’s Liberation” (1969); Ross (1993),
and Smith (1970) on the complicated and contradictory aspects of gender
relations within the Panthers.
4 Space
precludes consideration of the writings of other socialist-feminist Black
women, like Maxine Williams and Pamela Newman, who published essays
critical of the middle-class biases of Black Liberation in a widely
circulated pamphlet from 1970 called Black Women’s Liberation.
5 To be sure, the eugenic orientation of some in the
birth control movement made advocacy of birth control practices difficult
for Black women (Rodrique 1990).
6
Robinson’s father, a physician, had been on the national board of
Planned Parenthood (Robinson 1967).
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Benita Roth earned her Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of California-Los Angeles.
She is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, SUNY
Binghamton. Her
primary research interests are women and social movement activism,
and women and work. Her article, "Feminist Boundaries in the
Feminist-Friendly Organization: The Women’s Caucus of ACT UP/LA,"
was published in the April 1998 issue of Gender and Society.
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