Feminism

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Feminism

As both an analytical tool and a political paradigm, black feminisms—referred to here in the plural because there is no one feminism—are fluid and diverse, focusing in various ways on the convergence of race, gender, sexuality, class, spirituality, and culture. This diversity is often oversimplified in an effort to provide a single, coherent picture.

The primary expressions of black feminism in the United States are marked by three distinct periods or waves that are directly connected to, and grew out of, key movements in African American history: the abolitionist movement, which culminated with the suffragists' securing passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920; the modern civil rights and black power movements, which peaked with the enforcement, during the 1970s, of Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the post–Civil Rights era that helped to usher in the professionalization and institutionalization of feminisms.

Abolitionists: Roots of Black Feminisms

The development of a distinctly feminist consciousness began during the era of slavery. Slave codes defined black folks as chattel, thereby allowing the “owners” of their bodies to deny them the rights and privileges of citizenship, to physically exploit their labor, and to abuse them. As legal “property,” enslaved women were constantly confronted with sexual abuse and lacked even the limited legal recourse enjoyed by their “free” counterparts. Primarily because of the mythical, stereotypical images surrounding black womanhood—a dichotomy, as Deborah Gray White has pointed out, that included Jezebel to excuse the sexual exploitation of black women on the one hand, and Mammy to codify the domestic role of black women in white households on the other—both “free” and enslaved black women were blamed for their own victimization. Like their enslaved sisters, “free” women could not escape the harmful consequences of these myths, and as abolitionists, they organized simultaneously against slavery as a legal institution and racially gendered sexual oppression.

Sojourner Truth

. To argue for racial and sexual equality in an environment that was hostile to both required courage and a passion for righteousness. The abolitionist and liberal reformer Sojourner Truth is rightly celebrated as the fountainhead of black feminist thinking in the nineteenth century. Born into slavery around 1799, Truth became an itinerant preacher in 1843 and went on to argue for the black feminist cause in evangelical language. Slave status, she preached, denied black women motherhood, protection from exploitation, and their innate feminine qualities. Truth's biblical-based feminism, charged by her riveting personal testimony, called attention to the way slavery stranded black women on the periphery of “becoming a woman.”

Although Truth was not the only black woman of her era—others included Jarena Lee and Marie Stewart—to advocate for women's rights through an appeal to the Bible, she was often the lone black voice among a chorus of prominent white feminists. By challenging the dominant ways of thinking in her time, Truth disrupted a political movement that sought to keep black woman on the outskirts.

As a pioneering black feminist, Truth's voice was most influential to contemporary feminists who, as Nell Painter observes, often combine the 1851 “and a'n't I a woman?” speech long attributed to Truth with her 1858 gesture of proving her sexual identity by publicly baring her breast to a heckling white audience. While the merging of these events resulted in an image of defiance that modern feminists may appreciate, Painter points out that it is not an accurate portrayal of the evangelical preacher herself. It is somewhat ironic that many feminists have pinned a revolutionary banner on the liberal Sojourner Truth, when the other most noted black woman of the nineteenth century, Harriet Tubman, was the genuine embodiment of a revolutionary abolitionist's black feminist spirit.

Harriet Tubman

. Challenging the exploitative system of slavery from the inside, Harriet Tubman worked over the course of her life to free herself and many others. Called “Moses” by all who loved and respected her, Tubman's refusal to be complacent in her own subjugation demonstrates a core feature of black feminisms. Born to enslaved parents about 1821, Tubman fled Maryland in 1849 upon learning that she would be sold into the horrific cotton belt. Resisting slavery with flight, and thereby repudiating the idea that running away was exclusively a masculine form of resistance, Tubman not only produced dramatic change in her own life but also served as an example to others that to do so was possible. As the celebrated conductor of the Underground Railroad, Tubman used discursive tactics and imaginative disguises to lead out of bondage more than two hundred enslaved persons, creating an important political marker for black feminisms. As a zealous abolitionist, Tubman's mode of action was linked to a political movement and culture that was in opposition to the violent world and racist discourses that elite southern plantation owners had created to rationalize the institution of slavery.

As a spy, scout, and military leader for the Union Army, Tubman piloted black troops up the Combahee River in South Carolina, securing the additional freedom of close to eight hundred enslaved persons. Breaking the boundaries of what was socially expected of a woman, “General Tubman” used warrior activism to add a thread of militancy to the future tapestry of revolutionary black feminisms. After the Civil War, Tubman was active in women's organizations and was a popular speaker at suffrage meetings. An advocate of greater attention to the needs of poor and aged persons, Tubman was in the vanguard of the human rights struggle.

The Growth of Black Feminisms

With the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment securing the right to vote for black men, a distinct woman's suffrage movement emerged that culminated in the years 1890–1920. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn chronicles the organized efforts of African American women to earn the right to vote. She places the activism of black women in the historical context of racist Jim Crow laws, pointing out the courage and vision it took for black women to pursue the right to vote at a time when white men and women alike sought to exclude them from it. This was a time when legal segregation and the theater of violence that surrounded public lynching kept African Americans under siege and in “their place.”

Despite the fact that white suffragists never hesitated to discuss how the vote could seal white supremacy, black feminists pressed for alliances with them. Refusing to desert the suffrage cause, black women organized voters' leagues and clubs. Noted black club women such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell rallied with fervency for the vote. They believed that black women needed the vote even more than did their white counterparts, because it would enable them to protect their inalienable rights and improve their schools and conditions as wage laborers. Ida B. Wells-Barnett's lifelong commitment to justice illustrates how a black woman's political activities could fluctuate between liberal and radical black feminisms. As a vocal suffragist and leader in the international antilynching campaign, Wells-Barnett challenged the myth that all white women were chaste, all black women were without virtue, and all black men were rapists. As a radical black feminist journalist, Wells-Barnett documented the economic success of lynching victims, the possibility—considered blasphemous—that a white woman could be attracted to a black man, and finally, the fact that black women were violated and abused at alarming rates. Wells-Barnett also fought against racist institutions and businesses with economic boycotts and was not above armed resistance.

As a prominent leader in the black woman's club movement, however, Wells-Barnett also advocated self-help activities largely supported by liberal black feminists who were personally invested in what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called the “politics of respectability.” Moving beyond Sojourner Truth's theological feminism but refusing to completely rid feminism of Christian moralism, club women believed that to display “proper” manners and to participate in bourgeois racial uplift organizations was the duty of a dignified “race woman.” Mary Church Terrell consistently argued that the advancement of the black race depended on “uplifting” the masses of black women, especially since society judged the black race by the “womanhood of our people.” Overly concerned with the white gaze, liberal black feminists at the turn of the century struggled to craft a political agenda that would include them as voters acceptable to whites, even as they resisted the harmful stereotypes that had become ubiquitous among white racists.

Dourniese Hawking, shown in February 1967, was the first black woman to wear a hard hat and boots for Consolidated Edison. Her work included checking gas leaks and excavating with a 90-pound jackhammer.

National Archives; Joe McCary, Photo Response Studio

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A radical black feminist critique of middle-class club women's activities might consider attempts to “elevate” the black masses by attacking their “morals” and regulating their behavior to be condescending and patronizing. Blues singers of the era, by contrast, simply refused to let themselves be stifled by bourgeois proscriptions for black womanhood. Performers such as “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith generated their own black feminist consciousness, introducing what Daphne Harrison has identified as a more assertive, independent, and sexually aware model for black women. In both their live performances and their recordings, they critiqued male chauvinism, patriarchy, and domestic violence. As women who freely expressed sexual desire and lesbianism during a period when heterosexual norms reigned supreme, blues singers pushed beyond middle-class black feminist discourses by asserting their sexual equality with men in both public and private spheres.

The Second Wave: The Women's Liberation Movement

Reaching beyond the limits of conventional notions of respectability and honor, black feminists during the second wave, 1965–1975, tackled an array of issues as they chipped away at legalized Jim Crow and demanded empowerment on their own terms. Despite the fact that the most celebrated leaders of the modern civil rights movement were men, African American women were leaders and foot soldiers at every stage and in every arena of the liberation struggle. In 1955 JoAnn Gibson Robinson and the Women's Political Council organized the Montgomery bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King Jr. into the leadership position of the nonviolent movement. Ella Baker, former field secretary for the NAACP and interim director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), organized college students in 1960 into the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Under Baker's guidance, SNCC activists ushered in the nonviolent, direct-action phase of the movement during the 1960s. Students initiated sit-ins and freedom rides to expose racial segregation and the violence used by whites to maintain separate and unequal facilities. As “the movement” grew in numbers and expanded regionally, it served as a political training ground for many women who would later participate in the second wave of feminism, the women's liberation movement.

Initially, the most common response by African American women to sexism in “the movement” was to hold those individuals who engaged in it personally accountable. Ella Baker struggled with Baptist ministers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whereas Ruby Doris Smith Robinson and other SNCC women personally asserted themselves and refused to be manipulated under the guise of “the struggle.” Thus, it is not surprising that historical documentation of a collective response by African American women to chauvinism during the nonviolent, direct-action stage of the movement is scarce.

In a point of departure from previous black feminists, black women at the end of the 1960s began to abandon the approach of individually holding chauvinistic culprits accountable to collective activism against the complex attitudes of many black men in “the movement.” Instead, black women began to form separate women's organizations and meeting in “consciousness-raising” groups to address the problems of sexism. Clayborne Carson documents that the only successful SNCC project after 1968 was the Black Women's Liberation Committee, renamed in 1970 the Third World Women's Alliance, under the leadership of Frances Beal.

With Beal as its New York City coordinator, the Alliance of about two hundred members expanded beyond SNCC activists, successfully organizing political education programs and study groups. Beal's influential 1970 essay, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” exemplified the focus of the Alliance as both a think tank and action group against counterrevolutionary institutions. The Alliance was marked by radicalism in both its understanding of relations between black women and men and its advocacy of armed struggle to bring about a socialist society.

Another departure from earlier black feminists involved the issue of welfare. African American women organized themselves in 1967 into a National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Although there had been local welfare groups throughout the country prior to 1967, George Wiley, an African American antipoverty activist, believed that black women needed a national organization to end poverty. NWRO members pushed the movement from one of civil rights to one of economic entitlement, and linked the welfare issue to women's work.

NWRO members were black single mothers with little formal education who believed that the government had a responsibility to them and that they had the right to protest to change conditions. These black feminists courageously challenged a welfare system that dehumanized women and their children. Johnnie Tillmon organized the first welfare rights group in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1963 and served as the first chairwoman of the NWRO. Tillmon eloquently detailed how women on welfare were devalued and ably refuted the belief that mothers on public assistance chose to have more children in order to receive a larger welfare check, pointing out that such an idea was one that only men could believe. Such lies, she asserted, were just more extreme versions of the lies that were told about all women. While most liberal black feminists did not view an expansion of welfare as a victory and preferred to concentrate on white-collar employment, Tillmon and her fellow activists were certainly justified in their focus, given that the majority of black women were struggling to make ends meet. As radical black feminists, NWRO leaders refused to accept being stigmatized for exercising the right of motherhood; as activists, they pressured both state agencies and the federal government to reform AFDC by demanding higher welfare benefits and an end to humiliating service. It was clear to the members of NWRO that empowerment under capitalism required the ability to earn a living above the poverty line. It was not a matter just of eliminating sex discrimination in white-collar employment but of eliminating poverty.

By 1970 explicit discussions of sexuality had taken center stage in the women's movement, and black feminists' efforts to sculpt organizational agendas to address their concerns were too often marginalized or interpreted as divisive. Sexism in the Black Power movement and racism in the women's liberation movement pushed black feminists to organize independently. E. Frances White points out the paucity of scholarship critiquing sexism in the black liberation struggle when compared to that describing racism in the women's liberation movement, citing evidence of how Afrocentric thought can be radical in its analysis of racism but repressive in its view of gender dynamics within the black community.

As black feminists experienced tensions with both black men and white society at large, a cadre formed to found the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). Although it began modestly, with thirty or so members, after a single press conference the NBFO received hundreds of calls and letters from women all over the country inquiring about how to join and form local chapters. When its first conference was held in November 1973, more than 250 women attended. These women envisioned a multipurpose organization that would address an array of issues, ranging from employment and childcare concerns to sexuality, addiction, and black women's relations to each other and to the women's movement. White women who attended the conference later wrote that they now saw that before they could build coalitions with black women, they would first need to prove that they were not racist. During the first wave of feminism, black suffragists struggled with the racism of white women, but the second wave required nonracist entry tickets that proved difficult for white women to produce. While white women and all men had access to the large assembly at the conference, they were not admitted into the workshops.

Unfortunately, after the conference the NBFO did not have a far-reaching political influence. First, African American women had to deal with many issues in their own lives, and they were not able to generate a powerful political movement around a few issues, the way the National Organization for Women (NOW) could. Second, the most commonly held notion of who these “women's libbers” were, combined with their selective agenda, confirmed to many African American women that anything associated with “feminism” was bourgeois and advantageous only to white women. The majority of African American women did not have the choice to be liberated from the “kitchen.” The economic realities of most African American women dictated that they had to work outside the home. Indeed, as domestic workers, it was often their underpaid labor that provided the means to “liberate” white women from their household responsibilities in the first place.

Although the NBFO did not survive long as an active organization, it served to motivate small clusters of black women to continue to put pressure on NOW's leadership to shape its agenda to include issues important to all women, regardless of class and status. Even with this added pressure, the overall participation of black women in the women's liberation movement had drastically decreased by 1975. As organized black feminist activism waned, it was largely lesbian groups that continued to struggle in a collective fashion around feminist issues. Their identity as lesbians made them more aware of heterosexuality as an institution and the need to challenge patriarchy. In 1974, the Combahee River Collective was formed by a small group of socialist black feminists who were disappointed by what they saw as the NBFO's “bourgeois” stance and lack of a clear political focus, and who chose to identify with Harriet Tubman's militancy. Three years later, the group issued a widely quoted statement defining its political commitment to dismantling “interlocking” racial, sexual, and economic oppression. These women, along with other black lesbian groups, such as the Salsa Soul Sisters, envisioned organizing other black feminists and lesbians through writing and publishing.

By the early 1980s, feminist writers' collectives and black feminists who had taken advantage of civil rights and Black Power victories by bunkering down in the academy had generated a profound discourse about black women, expressed in both theory and fiction. Toni Cade Bambara's foundational work, The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), featured writers such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Nikki Giovanni and thoughtful essays on the experiences of African American women. Other groundbreaking literary and political essays and historical and fictional works by writers as varied as Jeanne Noble, Darlene Clark Hine, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley, Frances Beal, Angela Davis, Barbara Smith, Barbara Christian, Mary Helen Washington, and Toni Morrison, signaled the coming of age of contemporary black feminist studies.

Contemporary Feminisms

The decade of the 1980s was an important time in which a growing number of black women writers and literary critics rigorously theorized about gender and black women as subjects in historical and contemporary contexts. bell hooks's vanguard scholarship represented a shift in black feminisms because she charged that stories of personal experience, while valuable, could not do the work of theory. hooks recognized the significance of black feminists such as Sojourner Truth, whose personal testimonies “validated” the need for a movement. Yet hooks encouraged black women to develop a theoretical framework to evaluate strategies and to challenge and change structures of domination.

Though they recognized theory as a means of stimulating a particular mode of action, and vice versa, many contemporary black feminists nevertheless resisted the theory-practice dichotomy, which they saw as too often privileging Western knowledge over other forms of analysis. Barbara Christian, in her seminal essay “The Race for Theory,” explains how by exalting theory as the sacred mark of brilliance, we too often undermine the narrative forms, such as creative writing, that are central to black women thinkers. Many noted black women poets and fiction writers—such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde—were political activists in “the movement” and participated in consciousness-raising liberation groups. Sketching out new ways of thinking about capitalism, sexism, identity formation, and black cultures, their work has transformed the “individual” and has given black women multiple voices of inspiration as well as multiple visions of how things ought to be. In essence, black feminists have overcome the academic binary of theory and practice by making use of all the methods—speeches, songs, written text, and activism—previously employed by black women to re-read and re-interpret the intellectual, social, political, economic, legal, and emotional worlds of black people.

Nowhere is this fusion of theory and practice more evident than in the area of black feminist jurisprudence. Black feminist legal scholars such as Paulette M. Caldwell, Patricia J. Williams, Kimberle Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris, and Regina Austin are committed to demystifying the legal issues that are unique to black women. For example, Caldwell argues that the law does not adequately recognize black women's issues. She points out that because Title VII did not create a subcategory for black women, it is difficult for black women to win cases in which white women or black men have been hired in their stead or have received promotions over them. Collectively, the work of these legal scholars has galvanized black feminist scholarship by carving out an important niche in advocating a feminism that directly affects the lives of black women. With an approach that combines personal histories and a focus on legal cases, their writings have exposed the interconnectedness of laws, race, gender, and class in a way that challenges the traditional, technical forms of legal discourse. Allegorical and case-contextual, their language is accessible (an important prerequisite for empowerment) to legal scholars, policy makers, and grassroots activists alike. Overall, these and other academic black feminists have asserted the significance of black women's experiences while developing new ways to debate and dissect the master narrative of Western knowledge and cultural practices. Anchoring their analysis that racism, patriarchy, and material location drastically affect options and choices for black women, many academicians have been mindful that theory must be rooted in practice if it is to remain inclusive and non-elitist. Unfortunately, it has often proven difficult for these black feminists to find intellectual homes in either Women's Studies or Black Studies programs. Too often branded as “troublemakers,” black feminists have struggled in departments that are hostile to their analytical projects and scholarly imaginations.

The professionalization of feminism also occurred outside the academy. Contemporary feminist projects such as the National Black Women's Health Project (NBWHP), under the leadership of Byllye Avery, and women's refuge shelters created to deal with violent crimes against women were institutional examples of such critical feminist practice. These projects also indicate how institution building in the “real world” can make use of the insights that theory has given us. For instance, in 1983, the NBWHP members organized a conference to break the “conspiracy of silence” around health issues. Avery points out that to talk about abortion first requires being able to talk about birth control, which in turn requires being able to talk about sex. Understanding that black women's health issues must be addressed within a cultural context, Avery asserts that a silence around such issues was passed down through generations. More than two thousand women attended the conference and later formed self-health groups focused on the problems that make them sick—obesity, domestic violence, sexual abuse, and drugs. As black feminists, these women sought empowerment through wellness of the body and spirit.

Moving in the direction of allowing a number of characteristics to be considered indicators of feminist thought, black feminists' interventions both inside and outside the academy have framed the problems of women within a larger discourse of rethinking “woman” and hegemonic power. Contemporary feminists have theorized the cultural meaning of “woman,” going beyond a fixed, unified subject, and separating gendered behavior from the biological body. Ironically, the diversity of women's experience has been used by some to obliterate the progressive political essence of feminism, resulting in the apolitical concept of a “lifestyle feminist.” bell hooks makes the point that if we allow women to define feminism however they see fit, we will soon find ourselves saying any woman can be a feminist, regardless of her political beliefs. In her essay, “Must We Call All Women ‘Sister’?” she critiques the black feminist campaign in support of Anita Hill, despite her conservative, antifeminist political history. In short, the spread of “lifestyle feminism” explains why conser-vative and reactionary political voices or even female hip-hop artists who promulgate sexual stereotypes—as opposed to attacking the culture of violence and misogyny within the male-dominated industry—see no contradiction in claiming black feminist identities.

Given the discursive power of race, black feminists have not had the privilege of abandoning the construction of a singular racial identity, though they recognize the plurality of identities within their own existence. As theoreticians who draw on a range of frameworks—Marxist, Afrocentric, psychoanalytic, religious, socialist, postmodern, poststructuralist, pan-African, nationalist, African feminist—black feminists have used their utterances, writings, and activism to grapple systematically with the institutionalized oppression of black women. Black feminists' interventions have not only changed over time but have also varied within the same material location, thereby uprooting the notion of a collective black experience and a unitary feminist thought. With their unique perspectives on the intersection of race, sexuality, and class within particular historical moments, the varieties of black feminism attest to the many ways black women have found to take a stand against sexism while remaining in critical solidarity with other political discourses.

Clearly, there are many black feminist traditions. Despite the intellectual demand for coherence within feminist theory, it is important to go beyond a one-dimensional view of the concept. Indeed, coming to grips with the diversity of black feminisms is one way of coming to grips with the diversity of black women's experiences.

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