Black Feminism
in a white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy
4 themes
• Black women empower themselves by creating selfdefinitions and self-valuations that enable themselves to
establish positive, multiple images and repel negative,
controlling representations of Black womanhood;
•
• Black women confront and dismantle the interlocking and
overarching structure of domination in terms of race,
gender, and class oppression;
•
• BW intertwine intellectual thought and political action
(theory and practice; or praxis);
•
• BW recognize a distinct cultural heritage that gives them
the energy and skills to resist and overcome daily
discrimination.
Patricia Hill Collins sums it up by saying that
Black feminism is “a process of self-conscious
struggle that empowers women and men to
actualize a humanist vision of community.”
Two Waves of Black Feminism
• “Two waves” of Black feminism (Ula Taylor,
Journal of Black Studies, 1998).
•
• First wave connected to the abolitionist
movement; second to the civil rights
movement.
• Between 1830 and 1865, BW abolitionists
developed a feminist consciousness that reflected
their particular experiences as BW as well as
aspects of sexism they shared with white women.
“Free” and enslaved AA women created
numerous strategies and tactics to dismantle
slavery as a legal institution and resist racially
gendered sexual abuse.
•
• During this period, because of mythical, stereotypical
images of Black womanhood, free and enslaved AA women
were blamed for their own victimization.
•
• The core of the myth surrounded the Jezebel/Mammy
dichotomy. “Jezebel” excused miscegenation and the
sexual exploitation of Black women. “Mammy” endorsed
service of Black women in southern households. Like their
enslaved sisters, free Black women could not escape the
harmful effects of these myths and as reformers they
organized against race and gender oppression
simultaneously.
•
• AA female abolitionists feminist consciousness blossomed
as they campaigned for equal rights within the context of
organized Black abolitionism. Sojourner Truth, 19th century
Black reformer couched her arguments in evangelical
language. Truth’s narrative, “Aren’t I a Woman?,” highlights
a theological justification for the abolition of slavery and
the granting of equal rights for men and women.
• Slave status denied Black women motherhood, protection
from exploitation and feminine qualities. Truth’s call
empowered Black women by bringing attention to the
intersection of race and gender.
•
• After passage of the 13th amendment, tensions between
abolitionists and feminists exploded over the issue of
suffrage. Despite the fact that white women exploited and
betrayed Black women during the suffrage movement,
Black women nevertheless played an important role in the
fight for women’s right to vote, and this in the context of
the brutal Jim Crow legal racist structure.
•
• Black women like Ida B. Wells-Barnett argued that Black
women needed the vote even more than their white
counterparts to protect their inalienable rights and improve
their schools and status as wage-laborers.
•
• Wells-Barnett challenged the myths that all
white women were chaste and all Black
women were without virtue and that all Black
men were rapists, by unleashing a massive
international campaign against lynching. She
documented the economic conditions of the
lynching victims, and that white women could
be attracted to Black men and that Black
women were being violated and abused at
alarming rates.
• After passage of the 19th amendment, Black women tried to
cast their votes but were met with hostility not only at the
polls in states like Georgia, Mississippi, and Florida, but at the
National Women’s Party Convention in 1921. 60 AA women
from 14 states requested an interview with Alice Paul, leader
of the NWP, to discuss the disenfranchisement of Black
Women. Paul agreed to listen but did not accept their request
to present their plea to the convention. Journalists for the
magazine the Nation (still in existence) revealed that AA
women sought to have Paul form a special committee to
investigate the violations during the 1920 election, but that
Paul was indifferent to and resentful of the AA delegation. Paul
and other white leaders repeatedly explained that Black
women were no worse off than Black men in these states.
(Florida in the 2000 election needs to be viewed historically).
The Second Wave
During the Civil rights era, usually demarcated by the Brown
vs. Board decision in 1954, many of the leaders were men,
certainly the most visible ones in the mainstream media,
nevertheless BW were extremely important at the forefront
and on the ground.
•
• Ella Baker, Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, Septima Clark,
JoAnn Robinson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray-Adams,
Rosa Parks, Assata Shakur, Kathleen Cleaver, Angela Davis,
Elaine Brown (just to name a few of the most well-known),
dedicated themselves to civil rights and Black power as well
as equality for men and women.
• Ella Baker led the non-violent direct tactics of the SNCC sit-ins,
boycotts, and freedom rides, and it is well-known that the civil
rights movement served as a model for the women’s movement.
JoAnn Robinson and the Women’s Political Council organized the
Montgomery Bus Boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr.
onto the National stage. (see The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the
Women Who Started It, by JoAnn Robinson). Also, the Rosa Parks
Myth, that “she was a tired seamstress who was so tired after work
one day that she refused to move and then MLK led the boycott,
etc.” Rosa Parks was a longtime activist, member and leader of the
NAACP and many other organizations. It was planned civil
disobedience and she was ‘tired’ but not only or even primarily
physically tired from work, but ‘tired’ in the sense of fed-up with
racism, and not simply the separation of public facilities, but the
institutional subjugation of AA peoples.
•
• The Civil rights movement served as a training ground for Black
women who would lead the second wave of feminism, the women’s
liberation movement.
• But Black women were also beginning to challenge the
male-centeredness of the Civil rights organizations, where
Black women fully participated in and led the boycotts, sitins, Freedom Summer, March on Washington, and other
important campaigns, yet back at the office they did
housework, typed, cooked, and when the media called, the
men were put in front.
•
• There were also complicated personal/political struggles
going on, and relationships between Black men and white
women during the movement became politicized.
•
•
• In 1966, Betty Freidan and two Black women, Aileen Hernandez and
Pauli Murray, along with a group of prominent professional women,
founded the National Organization of Women. This was in part a
response to the feeling of many Black and White women that what
was need was an “NAACP for Women”.
•
• But NOW was flooded with younger white women who were
refugees of the much more (compared to SNCC, e.g.) sexist,
patriarchal New Left political organizations such as the SDS, and so
like their foremothers, the second wave of feminists forged their
feminism in the anti-racist struggle, but ultimately abandoned this
struggle to form organizations that catered to the needs and
concerns of white middle and upper middle class women.
• African American women did not have the privilege of
abandoning the anti-racist struggle. As AA struggled
against the backlash brought on by the passage of the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, the Black Power movement emerged.
This shift in the movement toward a nationalist trend had a
profound impact on Black feminists.
•
• On the one hand, nationalism has a vision that includes
women, for no nation can survive without women, and it
recognizes that women too suffer under colonialism and
racism, but on the other hand women again often found
themselves in secondary roles and used as symbols by their
male counterparts.
• Assata Shakur and Elaine Brown paint two very different pictures of
the role of women in the Black Panther party. Shakur shows that
women were the real basis of the community programs like the free
breakfast program, but Brown details physical abuse and sexist
power plays between men and women.
•
• But men and women worked side by side in successful campaigns
such as the election of Shirley Chisholm as the first Black woman in
Congress.
•
• Women began organizing on their own and many of the most
successful campaigns were led by women, including the creation of
the Black Women’s Liberation Committee, later renamed the Third
World Women’s Alliance under Frances Beal.
• Beal’s 1970 essay “Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female” was
an important moment in the development of Contemporary Black
Feminism, but her work went beyond theory, exemplifying one of
the core characteristics of BF highlighted by Collins.
• The TWWA participated in the “Liberation Day” parade celebrating
the 19th amendment on August 26, 1970. White and Black women
clashed over support for Angela Davis, the whites saying that
Angela Davis has nothing to do with the women’s struggle and the
Black women saying she may have nothing to with your struggle but
she certainly does ours.
•
• Beal stated that any women’s struggle that is not anti-racist and
anti-imperialist has nothing in common with the Black women’s
struggle.
• Another point of conflict between white and Black women in the
women’s movement had to do with the emerging anti-poverty
movement and welfare movement. The National Welfare Rights
Organization was founded in 1967, though earlier regional groups
had been formed earlier.
•
• Again, many of the white middle class women in the women’s
movement did not see the importance of the anti-poverty and
welfare rights movements, concentrating instead on women’s place
in the professions, glass ceilings and under-representation in fields
such as law, medicine, academia, and the corporate office.
• Black feminists responded that it is not just a matter of sex
discrimination in white collar employment but poverty elimination.
• 1973 saw the formation of the National Black Feminist
Organization. It had a successful conference in November of 1973
but had difficulty sustaining momentum in part because most Black
women did not have the luxury of devoting full-time to a political
movement. Again, the class issue came in, as an important issue
between Black and white female activists. As Toni Morrison wrote
during this period:
•
• It is a source of amusement even now to Black women to listen to
feminists talk of liberation, while back at home somebody’s nice
Black grandmother shoulders the daily responsibility of child rearing
and floor mopping and the liberated one comes home to examine
the housekeeping, correct it, and be entertained by the children. If
women’s liberation needs those grandmothers to thrive, it has a
serious flaw.
• The late 70s saw the creation of Black feminist groups like
the Combahee River Collective, issuing important
statements that stressed their commitment to dismantling
the interlocking structures of race/class/gender
oppressions.
• The 80s and 90s saw the emergence of new contemporary
Black feminist theory and practice, especially with the
development of liberatory and emancipatory theoretical
frameworks dealing with epistemological issues. bell
hooks, e.g. But these cutting edge Black feminists also take
us back to the important history of the movement and the
foremothers who led the way, and without which they
would not be here to speak. Still, many argue that we have
entered the Third Wave of Black feminism.