essay on black feminism

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The Revolutionary Practice of Black Feminisms

The black feminist tradition grows not out of other movements, but out of the condition of being both black and a woman. It is a long tradition which resists easy definition and is characterized by its multi-dimensional approach to liberation.

In 1864, Sojourner Truth sold cartes-de-visite, small photographs mounted to a paper card, to support her activism. Featuring the slogan “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” Truth capitalized on the popularity of these collector’s items to support herself and fund her speaking tours. As a formerly enslaved person, claiming ownership of her image for her own profit was revolutionary. Truth reportedly said that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.” Though expressions of black feminism can be seen in written accounts as far back as the 1830s, Sojourner Truth is the most widely known nineteenth-century black feminist foremother. Throughout her life, Truth linked the movement to abolish slavery and the movement to secure women’s rights, stating that for black women, race and gender could not be separated. 

Left to right: carte-de-visite portrait of Sojourner Truth, 1864; carte-de-visite portrait of Sojourner Truth, 1863; cabinet card of Sojourner Truth, 1864

Truth’s speeches and activism represent an early expression of the black feminist tradition. Black feminism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and activist practice grounded in black women’s lived experiences. Its scope is broad, making it difficult to define. In fact, the diversity of opinion among black feminists makes it more accurate to think of black feminisms in the plural. In an oral history interview from the Museum’s collection, noted activist and scholar Angela Davis speaks to this point:

I rarely talk about feminism in the singular. I talk about feminisms. And, even when I myself refused to identify with feminism, I realized that it was a certain kind of feminism . . . It was a feminism of those women who weren’t really concerned with equality for all women... Dr. Angela Davis August 5th, 2019, Oral History Interview, National Museum of African American History and Culture

Despite different visions, a few foundational principles do exist among black feminisms:

• Black women’s experience of racism, sexism, and classism are inseparable.
• Their needs and worldviews are distinct from those of black men and white women.
• There is no contradiction between the struggle against racism, sexism, and all other-isms. All must be addressed simultaneously.

Pin for the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs owned by Mary Church Terrell, 20th century.

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“Lifting as we climb,” the slogan of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), became a well-known motto for black women’s activism in the late nineteenth century. By this time, middle class black women organized social and political reform through women’s organizations, or clubs. Having had more resources and access to education than a woman like Sojourner Truth, these women’s experiences led them to a different expression of black feminism. Their project of racial uplift focused on combating harmful stereotypes surrounding black women’s sexuality and gender identity.

Problematically, they emphasized elevating poor women, less out of a sense of good-will, than out of a recognition that black women of any class would be judged through the circumstances of those “with the fewest resources and the least opportunity.” In discussing the motto of the NACW, Mary Church Terrell, founding president of the organization, said, “Even though we wish to shun them…we cannot escape the consequences of their acts… Self-preservation would demand that we go among the lowly… to whom we are bound by ties of race and sex.”

Service Award pin for Mary Church Terrell from the NACW, 1900.

Photograph of Mary Church Terrell by Addison Scurlock, ca. 1910.

Plaque for National Association of Colored Women service award, 1949.

Gallery Modal

The black feminism of the club movement is often overlooked, but as black feminist theorist Brittney Cooper points out, clubs such as the NACW can be seen as sites of development for black feminist leadership and thought despite their elitism. The club movement ushered in a new era of intellectual, artistic, and philosophical production by black women about their own experiences.

Placard with "STOP RACISM NOW" message, late 20th century. Commissioned by the National Organization for Women.

Pauli Murray , an activist, writer, Episcopal priest, and legal scholar, played an important role in several civil, social, and legal organizations including the National Organization of Women (NOW), which she cofounded in 1966. Throughout her life, Murray had romantic relationships with women but did not consider herself a lesbian. Her biographer, Rosalind Rosenburg, suggests that had Murray been alive today, she likely would have embraced a transgender identity. Murray wrote and theorized extensively on her experiences of black womanhood asserting that, for her, gender, race, and sexuality could not be separated. This refusal to separate her identity fueled her legal work and activism. In the NOW placard above from shortly after the group’s founding, the political connections between the women’s movement and anti-racist activity can be seen. However, Murray would soon become disillusioned with NOW as she saw the organization distance itself from economic and racial justice.

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray in her study in Arlington, Virginia, December 1976.

Members of the National Council of Negro Women including Dorothy Height and Pauli Murray (both seated), 1976.

Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray being ordained at the National Cathedral, January 1977.

As the only female student at Howard University Law School, Pauli Murray developed the term Jane Crow, the “twin evil of Jim Crow,” to describe the sexism black women faced. She would continue to develop theoretical, legal, and political frameworks for describing black women’s experiences. Her legal work connecting race-based and sex-based discrimination led to the inclusion of sex-based discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause. However, due to the Civil Rights Movement’s demands for “respectable” performances of black womanhood, Murray’s many contributions to civil rights history remain relatively unknown. Despite this neglect of her work, the legal and theoretical parallels she drew between racial discrimination and gender discrimination set the stage for feminist thinkers to follow.

One truth, especially within the context of black feminisms, is that queer black feminism has always been part of this. That queer black women, queer black folks have always been in these spaces. Dr. Treva Lindsey 2019 NMAAHC public program "Is Womanist to Feminists as Purple is to Lavender?: African American Women Writers and Scholars Discuss Feminism"

The 1970s marked an increase in explicitly black feminist organizing, due in part to tensions inflamed during the Women’s Liberation and Civil Rights Movements. By this time, queer black feminists were becoming more openly and visibly positioned within black feminist groups. They also began creating their own organizations—such as the Salsa Soul Sisters , one of the first out and explicitly multi-cultural lesbian organizations —due to tensions with straight black feminists as well as white gays and lesbians. The influential Combahee River Collective statement , co-authored by Barbara Smith, expressed a radical, queer black feminist platform still relevant to expressions of black feminism today.

Barbara Smith at a National Gay Rights March, 1993.

Marchers with "Salsa Soul Sisters" banners, 1983.

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, 1984.

In 1983, Alice Walker developed the term “womanist” to describe “a Black feminist or feminist of color.” Her term defined a more communal and humanist expression of feminism that acknowledged queer black women and aligned with long-standing traditions of black women’s thought and activism. Sister Outsider , by Audre Lorde, is one of many foundational womanist writings produced during this period. In her essays and speeches, Lorde discusses the connected issues of sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism, while calling for new tactics that centered these intersections.

Black women are often thought to be at a disadvantage because of racism and sexism, but some black feminists view their position as one of possibility. They argue that in the struggle for freedom, the people most exposed to different forms of oppression understand best how to dismantle them. While late nineteenth century black feminisms were grounded in heterosexual black women’s bodies, by the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, radical black feminisms came to center queer and trans black women, girls, and gender nonconforming people.

Untitled , 2015. Photograph by Sheila Pree Bright taken at a Black Lives Matter rally in Atlanta, Georgia.

Marchers at the Women’s March, January 21, 2017.

Untitled , August 25, 2015.

Outside black feminist circles, black feminisms are often described as an outgrowth of other freedom struggles. While black women’s experiences working within political and social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries certainly informed articulations of black feminism, black feminisms have never been derivative, nor do they fit cleanly into the “waves” of feminist history . For black women and other women of color, race and gender are inseparable, and black feminists resist all movements that ignore this reality. From women’s suffrage to the Women’s March of 2017, they have been unwilling to compromise on the assertion that a feminism which does not incorporate different experiences of womanhood cannot achieve full liberation. Since before Sojourner Truth sold her “shadow,” women in the black feminist tradition have developed theoretical frameworks and practices born of their experiences, to get, as black feminist scholar Dr. Treva Lindsey put it, “freer and freer and freer.”

Browse Objects Relating to Feminism in the NMAAHC Collection

Written by Max Peterson, Fall 2019 Intern Published on March 4, 2019

Is Womanist to Feminist as Purple is to Lavender?: African American Women Writers and Scholars Discuss Feminism program - https://www.ustream.tv/recorded/124469629

Guy-Sheftall, Beverley, ed. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought. New York, NY: The New Press, 1995.

Cooper, Brittney C. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Springer, Kimberly. Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Walker, Alice.  In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose . San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Subtitle here for the credits modal.

Black feminism and intersectionality

“Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women.” —the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977 1

“The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought.” —Black feminist and scholar Barbara Smith, 1983 2

Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in her insightful 1989 essay, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” 3 The concept of intersectionality is not an abstract notion but a description of the way multiple oppressions are experienced. Indeed, Crenshaw uses the following analogy, referring to a traffic intersection, or crossroad, to concretize the concept:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. . . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. 4

Crenshaw argues that Black women are discriminated against in ways that often do not fit neatly within the legal categories of either “racism” or “ sexism”—but as a combination of both racism and sexism. Yet the legal system has generally defined sexism as based upon an unspoken reference to the injustices confronted by all (including white) women, while defining racism to refer to those faced by all (including male) Blacks and other people of color. This framework frequently renders Black women legally “invisible” and without legal recourse.

Crenshaw describes several employment discrimination-based lawsuits to illustrate how Black women’s complaints often fall between the cracks precisely because they are discriminated against both as women and as Blacks. The ruling in one such case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors , filed by five Black women in 1976, demonstrates this point vividly. 

The General Motors Corporation had never hired a Black woman for its workforce before 1964—the year the Civil Rights Act passed through Congress. All of the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs fairly quickly, however, in mass layoffs during the 1973–75 recession. Such a sweeping loss of jobs among Black women led the plaintiffs to argue that seniority-based layoffs, guided by the principle “last hired-first fired,” discriminated against Black women workers at General Motors, extending past discriminatory practices by the company.

Yet the court refused to allow the plaintiffs to combine sex-based and race-based discrimination into a single category of discrimination:

The plaintiffs allege that they are suing on behalf of black women, and that therefore this lawsuit attempts to combine two causes of action into a new special sub-category, namely, a combination of racial and sex-based discrimination…. The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new “super-remedy” which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Thus, this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both. 5

In its decision, the court soundly rejected the creation of “a new classification of ‘black women’ who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.” 6

Crenshaw observes of this ruling that “providing legal relief only when Black women show that their claims are based on race or on sex is analogous to calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified.” 7

“Ain’t we women?” After Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality in 1989, it was widely adopted because it managed to encompass in a single word the simultaneous experience of the multiple oppressions faced by Black women. But the concept was not a new one. Since the times of slavery, Black women have eloquently described the multiple oppressions of race, class, and gender—referring to this concept as “interlocking oppressions,” “simultaneous oppressions,” “double jeopardy,” “triple jeopardy” or any number of descriptive terms. 8  

Like most other Black feminists, Crenshaw emphasizes the importance of Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech delivered to the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? 9

Truth’s words vividly contrast the character of oppression faced by white and Black women. While white middle-class women have traditionally been treated as delicate and overly emotional—destined to subordinate themselves to white men—Black women have been denigrated and subject to the racist abuse that is a foundational element of US society. Yet, as Crenshaw notes, “When Sojourner Truth rose to speak, many white women urged that she be silenced, fearing that she would divert attention from women’s suffrage to emancipation,” invoking a clear illustration of the degree of racism within the suffrage movement. 10

Crenshaw draws a parallel between Truth’s experience with the white suffrage movement and Black women’s experience with modern feminism, arguing, “When feminist theory and politics that claim to reflect women’s experiences and women’s aspirations do not include or speak to Black women, Black women must ask, “Ain’t we women?” 

Intersectionality as a synthesis of oppressions Thus, Crenshaw’s political aims reach further than addressing flaws in the legal system. She argues that Black women are frequently absent from analyses of either gender oppression or racism, since the former focuses primarily on the experiences of white women and the latter on Black men.  She seeks to challenge both feminist and antiracist theory and practice that neglect to “accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender,” arguing that “because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.” 11  

Crenshaw argues that a key aspect of intersectionality lies in its recognition that multiple oppressions are not each suffered separately but rather as a single, synthesized experience. This has enormous significance at the very practical level of movement building. 

In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment , published in 1990, Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins extends and updates the social contradictions raised by Sojourner Truth, while crediting collective struggles waged historically with establishing a “collective wisdom” among Black women:

If women are allegedly passive and fragile, then why are Black women treated as “mules” and assigned heavy cleaning chores? If good mothers are supposed to stay at home with their children, then why are US Black women on public assistance forced to find jobs and leave their children in day care? If women’s highest calling is to become mothers, then why are Black teen mothers pressured to use Norplant and Depo Provera? In the absence of a viable Black feminism that investigates how intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and class foster these contradictions, the angle of vision created by being deemed devalued workers and failed mothers could easily be turned inward, leading to internalized oppression. But the legacy of struggle among US Black women suggests that a collectively shared Black women’s oppositional knowledge has long existed. This collective wisdom in turn has spurred US Black women to generate a more specialized knowledge, namely, Black feminist thought as critical social theory. 12

Like Crenshaw, Collins uses the concept of intersectionality to analyze how “oppressions [such as ‘race and gender’ or ‘sexuality and nation’] work together in producing injustice.” But Collins adds the concept “matrix of dominations” to this formulation: “In contrast, the matrix of dominations refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized. Regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression.” 13

Elsewhere, Collins acknowledges the crucial component of social class among Black women in shaping political perceptions. In “The Contours of an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology,” she argues that “[w]hile a Black woman’s standpoint and its accompanying epistemology stem from Black women’s consciousness of race and gender oppression, they are not simply the result of combining Afrocentric and female values— standpoints are rooted in real material conditions structured by social class. ” 14 [Emphasis added.]

Fighting sexism in a profoundly racist society Because of the historic role of slavery and racial segregation in the United States, the development of a unified women’s movement requires recognizing the manifold implications of this continuing racial divide. While all women are oppressed as women, no movement can claim to speak for all women unless it speaks for women who also face the consequences of racism—which place women of color disproportionately in the ranks of the working class and the poor. Race and class therefore must be central to the project of women’s liberation if it is to be meaningful to those women who are most oppressed by the system.

Indeed, one of the key weaknesses of the predominantly white US feminist movement has been its lack of attention to racism, with enormous repercussions. Failure to confront racism ends up reproducing the racist status quo.

The widely accepted narrative of the modern feminist movement is that it initially involved white women beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who were later joined by women of color following in their footsteps. But this narrative is factually incorrect. 

Decades before the rise of the modern women’s liberation movement, Black women were organizing against their systematic rape at the hands of white racist men. Women civil rights activists, including Rosa Parks, were part of a vocal grassroots movement to defend Black women subject to racist sexual assaults—in an intersection of oppression unique to Black women historically in the United States.

Danielle L. McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power 15 argues that

throughout the twentieth century…Black women regularly denounced their sexual misuse. By deploying their voices as weapons in the wars against white supremacy, whether in the church, the courtroom, or in congressional hearings, African American women loudly resisted what Martin Luther King, Jr., called the “thingification” of their humanity. Decades before radical feminists in the women’s movement urged rape survivors to “speak out,” African American women’s public protests galvanized local, national, and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity. 16

The invention of the Black “matriarchy” In the 1960s, the contrast between white middle-class and Black women’s oppression could not have been more obvious. The same “experts” who prescribed a life of happy homemaking for white suburban women, as documented in Betty Friedan’s enormously popular The Feminine Mystique , reprimanded Black women for their failure to conform to this model. 17 Because Black mothers have traditionally worked outside the home in much larger numbers than their white counterparts, they were blamed for a range of social ills on the basis of their relative economic independence.

Socialist-feminist Stephanie Coontz describes “Freudians and social scientists” who “insisted that Black men had been doubly emasculated—first by slavery and later by the economic independence of their women.” Many in the African-American media also accepted this analysis. A 1960 Ebony magazine article stated plainly that the traditional independence of the Black woman meant that she was “more in conflict with her innate biological role than the white woman.” 18  

This theme emerged full throttle in 1965, when the US Department of Labor issued a report entitled, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The report, authored by future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, describes a “Black matriarchy” at the center of a “tangle of pathology” afflicting Black families, leading to a cycle of poverty. “A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife,” in which Black women consistently earn more than their men, argues Moynihan.

The report states, “In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.” The report explains why this is the case:

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage. 19  

This example demonstrates why gender discrimination cannot be effectively understood without factoring in the role of racism. And Black feminists since that time have made a priority of examining the interlocking relationship between gender, race, and class that many white feminists tended to ignore at the time. In so doing, they demonstrated that women of color are not merely “doubly oppressed” by both sexism and racism. Black women’s experience of sexism is shaped equally by racism and class inequality and is therefore different in certain respects from the experience of white, middle-class women.

“Two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal” The 1950s and1960s was also a period of intensive racial polarization in the United States, as the massive Civil Rights Movement struggled to end both Jim Crow segregation throughout the South and de facto racial segregation in the North. Interracial marriage was still banned in sixteen states in 1967 when the Supreme Court finally ruled such bans unconstitutional in the Loving v. Virginia decision.

Urban rebellions swept the country in the mid- to late-sixties, touched off by police brutality and other forms of racial discrimination in poverty-stricken Black ghettoes. In 1967, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, was established to investigate the root causes of urban rebellions. In 1968, the Commission issued a report that included scathing indictment of racism and segregation in US society. The report concludes:  

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.… Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. 20

The Kerner Commission emphasized that much of the problem was rooted in “[p]ervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress.” The Commission concluded that the degree of housing segregation was such that “to create an unsegregated population distribution, an average of over 86 percent of all Negroes would have to change their place of residence within the city.” 21  

In response to the extreme degree of racism and sexism they faced in the 1960s, Black women and other women of color began organizing against their oppression, forming a multitude of organizations. In 1968, for example, Black women from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed the Third World Women’s Alliance. In 1973, a group of notable Black feminists, including Florynce Kennedy, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith, formed the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). In 1974, Barbara Smith joined with a group of other Black lesbian feminists to found the Boston-based Combahee River Collective as a self-consciously radical alternative to the NBFO. The Combahee River Collective was named to commemorate the successful Underground Railroad Combahee River Raid of 1863, planned and led by Harriet Tubman, which freed 750 slaves. 

The Combahee River Collective’s defining statement, issued in 1977, described its vision for Black feminism as opposing all forms of oppression—including sexuality, gender identity, class, disability, and age oppression—later embedded in the concept of intersectionality.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. 22  

They added, “We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression.” 23

The consequences of ignoring class and racial differences between women As noted above, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique , published in 1963, gave voice to the anguish of white middle-class homemakers who were trapped in their suburban homes, doomed to lives revolving around fulfilling their families’ every need. The book immediately struck a chord with millions of women who desperately sought to escape the stultifying world of household drudgery. 

Friedan’s book, however, ignored the importance of the very real class and racial differences that exist between women. She made a conscious decision to target this particular audience of white middle-class women. As Coontz notes, “[T]he content of The Feminine Mystique and the marketing strategy that Friedan and her publishers devised for it ignored Black women’s positive examples of Friedan’s argument.” Friedan surely knew better. She had traveled in left-wing labor circles during the 1930s and 1940s but decided in the mid-1950s (at the height of the anticommunist witch hunts of the McCarthy era) to reinvent herself as an apolitical suburban wife. 24  

Few Black women or working-class women of any race would have been able to afford Friedan’s proposal that women hire domestic workers to perform their daily household chores while they were at work. Thus, “Black women who did read the book seldom responded as enthusiastically as did her white readers.” 25

Friedan praises those stay-at-home moms who had shown the courage to break from their traditional roles to seek well-paying careers, writing sympathetically that these women “had problems of course, tough ones—juggling their pregnancies, finding nurses and housekeepers, having to give up good assignments when their husbands were transferred.” 31 Yet she doesn’t deem it worthy to comment on the lives of the nursemaids and the housekeepers these career women hire, who also work all day but then return home to face housework and child care responsibilities of their own.

Soon after The Feminine Mystique was published, left-wing civil rights activist and women’s historian Gerda Lerner wrote to Friedan, praising the book but also expressing “one reservation:” Friedan had addressed the book “solely to the problems of middle class, college-educated women.” Lerner notes that “working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination.” 26  

It is also worth noting that Friedan introduces a profoundly anti-gay theme in The Feminine Mystique that would reverberate in her organizing efforts into the 1970s. She argues that “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene” has its roots in the feminine mystique, which can produce “the kind of mother-son devotion that can produce latent or overt homosexuality…. The boy smothered by such parasitical mother-love is kept from growing up, not only sexually, but in all ways.” 27  

Reproducing the myth of the Black rapist But racism was not limited to the more conservative wing of the women’s movement. Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape , published in 1975, describes the root of women’s oppression in the crudest of biological terms, based on men’s physical ability to rape: “When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it…. Man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function.” On this basis, Brownmiller concludes that men use rape to enforce their power over women: “[I]t is nothing more and nothing less than a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear.” 28

This theoretical framework, based purely on the supposed biological differences between men and women, allowed Brownmiller to justify reactionary assumptions in the name of combating women’s oppression. She reaches openly racist conclusions in her account of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. Fourteen-year-old Till, visiting family in Jim Crow Mississippi that summer, committed the “crime” of whistling at a married white woman named Carolyn Bryant, in a teenage prank. Till was tortured and shot before his young body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

Despite Till’s lynching, Brownmiller describes Till and his killer as sharing power over a “white woman,” using stereotypes that Black activist and scholar Angela Davis called “the resuscitation of the old racist myth of the Black rapist.” 29 

Brownmiller’s own words illustrate Davis’s insight:

Rarely has one single case exposed so clearly as Till’s the underlying group male antagonisms over access to women, for what began in Bryant’s store should not be misconstrued as an innocent flirtation…. Emmett Till was going to show his black buddies that he, and by inference, they could get a white woman and Carolyn Bryant was the nearest convenient object. In concrete terms, the accessibility of all white women was on review. 30 

Brownmiller also wrote, 

And what of the wolf whistle, Till’s ‘gesture of adolescent bravado?’… The whistle was no small tweet of hubba-hubba or melodious approval for a well turned ankle…. It was a deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her. 31

The acclaimed novelist, poet, and activist Alice Walker responded in the New York Times Book Review in 1975, “Emmett Till was not a rapist. He was not even a man. He was a child who did not understand that whistling at a white woman could cost him his life.” 32 Davis described the contradictions inherent in Brownmiller’s analysis of rape: “In choosing to take sides with white women, regardless of the circumstances, Brownmiller herself capitulates to racism. Her failure to alert white women about the urgency of combining a fierce challenge to racism with the necessary battle against sexism is an important plus for the forces of racism today.” 33

In 1976, Time magazine named Susan Brownmiller one of its “women of the year,” praising her book as “the most rigorous and provocative piece of scholarship that has yet emerged from the feminist movement.” 34 The objections to Brownmiller’s overtly racist standpoint from accomplished Black women such as Davis and Walker went largely unnoticed by the political mainstream. 

Fighting sexism and racism in the 1970s It must be acknowledged that many women of color who identified as feminists in the 1970s and 1980s were strongly critical of mainstream feminism’s refusal to challenge racism and other forms of oppression. Barbara Smith, for example, argued for the inclusion of all the oppressed in a 1979 speech, in a clear challenge to white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists:

The reason racism is a feminist issue is easily explained by the inherent definition of feminism. Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement . 35

But during the 1960s and 1970s, many Black women and other women of color also felt sidelined and alienated by the lack of attention to women’s liberation inside nationalist and other antiracist movements. The Combahee River Collective, for example, was made up of women who were veterans of the Black Panther Party and other antiracist organizations. In this political context, Black feminists established a tradition that rejects prioritizing women’s oppression over racism, and vice versa. This tradition assumes the connection between racism and poverty in capitalist society, thereby rejecting middle-class strategies for women’s liberation that disregard the centrality of class in poor and working-class women’s lives. 

Black feminists such as Angela Davis contested the theory and practice of white feminists who failed to address the centrality of racism. Davis’s groundbreaking book, Women, Race and Class , for example, examines the history of Black women in the United States from a Marxist perspective beginning with the system of slavery and continuing through to modern capitalism. Her book also examines the ways in which the issues of reproductive rights and rape, in particular, represent profoundly different experiences for Black and white women because of racism. Each of these is examined below.

• Reproductive rights and racist sterilization abuse Mainstream feminists of the 1960s and 1970s regarded the issue of reproductive rights as exclusively the winning of legal abortion, without acknowledging the racist policies that have historically prevented women of color from bearing and raising as many children as they wanted. 

Davis argues that the history of the birth control movement and its racist sterilization programs necessarily make the issue of reproductive rights far more complicated for Black women and other women of color, who have historically been the targets of this abuse. Davis traces the path of twentieth-century birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger from her early days as a socialist to her conversion to the eugenics movement, an openly racist approach to population control based on the slogan, “[More] children from the fit, less from the unfit.” 

Those “unfit” to bear children, according to the eugenicists, included the mentally and physically disabled, prisoners, and the non-white poor. As Davis noted, “By 1932, the Eugenics Society could boast that at least twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws, and that thousands of ‘unfit’ persons had been surgically prevented from reproducing.” 

In launching the “Negro Project” in 1939, Sanger’s American Birth Control League argued, “[T]he mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously.” In a personal letter, Sanger confided, “We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to their more rebellious members.” 36

Racist population-control policies left large numbers of Black women, Latinas, and Native American women sterilized against their will or without their knowledge. In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor Black teenagers were sterilized each year in Alabama. 

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an epidemic of sterilization abuse and other forms of coercion aimed at Black, Native American, and Latina women—alongside a sharp rise in struggles against this mistreatment. A 1970s study showed that 25 percent of Native American women had been sterilized, and that Black and Latina married women had been sterilized in much greater proportions than married women in the population at large. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico—still a US colony—had been permanently sterilized. 37  

Yet mainstream white feminists not only ignored these struggles but also added to the problem. Many embraced the goals of population control with all its racist implications as an ostensibly “liberal” cause.

In 1972, for example, a time when Native Americans and other women of color were struggling against coercive adoption policies that targeted their communities, Ms. Magazine asked its predominantly white and middle-class readership, “‘What do you do if you’re a conscientious citizen, concerned about the population explosion and ecological problems, love children, want to see what one of your own would look like, and want more than one?’ Ms. offered as a solution: ‘Have One, Adopt One.’” 38 The children on offer for adoption were overwhelmingly Native American, Black, Latino, and Asian.

To be sure, the legalization of abortion in the US Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was of paramount importance to all women and the direct result of grassroots struggle. Because of both the economic and social consequences of racism, the lives of Black women, Latinas, and other women of color were most at risk when abortion was illegal. Before abortion was made legal in New York City in 1970, for example, Black women made up 50 percent of all women who died after an illegal abortion, while Puerto Rican women were 44 percent. 39  

The legalization of abortion in 1973 is usually regarded as the most important success of the modern women’s movement. That victory however was accompanied at the end of that decade by the far less heralded but equally important victories against sterilization abuse, the result of grassroots struggles waged primarily by women of color. In 1978, the federal government conceded to demands by Native American, Black, and Latina activists by finally establishing regulations for sterilization. These included required waiting periods and authorization forms in the same language spoken by the woman agreeing to be sterilized. 40

Davis notes that women of color “were far more familiar than their white sisters with the murderously clumsy scalpels of inept abortionists seeking profit in illegality,” 41 yet were virtually absent from abortion rights campaigns. She concludes, “[T]he abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so, they might have understood why so many of their Black sisters adopted a posture of suspicion toward their cause.” 42

• The racial component of rape Rape is one of the most damaging manifestations of women’s oppression the world over. But rape also has had a toxic racial component in the United States since the time of slavery, as a key weapon in maintaining the system of white supremacy. Davis argues that rape is “an essential dimension of the social relations between slave master and slave,” involving the routine rape of Black slave women by their white masters. 43  

She describes rape as “a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women’s will to resist and, in the process, to demoralize their men.” 44 The institutionalized rape of Black women survived the abolition of slavery and took on its modern form: “Group rape, perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations of the post–Civil War period, became an uncamouflaged political weapon in the drive to thwart the movement for Black equality.” 45

Black Marxist-feminist Gloria Joseph makes the following insightful observation of the shared experience of racism among Black women and men: “The slave experience for Blacks in the United States made an ironic contribution to male-female equality. Laboring in the fields or in the homes, men and women were equally dehumanized and brutalized.” In modern society, she concludes, “The rape of Black women and the lynching and castration of Black men are equally heinous in their nature.” 46

The caricature of the virtuous white Southern belle under constant prey by Black male rapists had its opposite in the promiscuous Black woman seeking the sexual attention of white men. As Davis argues, “The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous…. Viewed as ‘loose women’ and whores, Black women’s cries of rape would necessarily lack legitimacy.” 47 As Lerner likewise describes, “The myth of the Black rapist of white women is the twin of the myth of the bad Black woman—both designed to apologize for and facilitate the continued exploitation of Black men and women.” 48

Brownmiller was not alone in failing to challenge racist assumptions about rape, with the consequence of reproducing them. Davis strongly criticizes 1970s-era white feminists for neglecting to integrate an analysis of racism with the theory and practice of combating rape: “During the contemporary anti-rape movement, few feminist theorists seriously analyzed the special circumstances surrounding the Black woman as rape victim. The historical knot binding Black women—systematically abused and violated by white men—to Black men—maimed and murdered because of the racist manipulation of the rape charge—has just begun to be acknowledged to any significant extent.” 49

Left-wing Black feminism as a politics of inclusion This article has attempted to show how Black feminists since the time of slavery have developed a distinct political tradition based upon a systematic analysis of the interlocking oppressions of race, gender, and class. Since the 1970s, Black feminists and other feminists of color in the United States have built upon this analysis and developed an approach that provides a strategy for combating all forms of oppression within a common struggle.  

Black feminists—along with Latinas and other women of color—of the 1960s era, who were critical of both the predominantly white feminist movement for its racism and of nationalist and other antiracist movements for their sexism, often formed separate organizations that could address the particular oppressions they faced. And when they rightfully asserted the racial and class differences between women, they did so because these differences were largely ignored and neglected by much of the women’s movement at that time, thereby rendering Black women and other women of color invisible in theory and in practice. 

The end goal was not, however, permanent racial separation for most left-wing Black and other feminists of color, as it has come to be understood since. Barbara Smith conceived of an inclusive approach to combat multiple oppressions, beginning with coalition building around particular struggles. As she observed in 1983, “The most progressive sectors of the women’s movement, including radical white women, have taken [issues of racism], and many more, quite seriously.” 50 Asian American feminist Merle Woo argues explicitly: “Today…I feel even more deeply hurt when I realize how many people, how so many people, because of racism and sexism, fail to see what power we sacrifice by not joining hands.” But, she adds, “not all white women are racist, and not all Asian-American men are sexist. And there are visible changes. Real, tangible, positive changes.” 51

The aim of intersectionality within the Black feminist tradition has been toward building a stronger movement for women’s liberation that represents the interests of all women. Barbara Smith described her own vision of feminism in 1984: “I have often wished I could spread the word that a movement committed to fighting sexual, racial, economic and heterosexist oppression, not to mention one which opposes imperialism, anti-Semitism, the oppressions visited upon the physically disabled, the old and the young, at the same time that it challenges militarism and imminent nuclear destruction is the very opposite of narrow.” 52

This approach to fighting oppression does not merely complement but also strengthens Marxist theory and practice—which seeks to unite not only all those who are exploited but also all those who are oppressed by capitalism into a single movement that fights for the liberation of all humanity. The Black feminist approach described above enhances Lenin’s famous phrase from What is to be Done? : “Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all  cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter  what class  is affected—unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other.” 53

The Combahee River Collective, which was perhaps the most self-consciously left-wing organization of Black feminists in the 1970s, acknowledged its adherence to socialism and anti-imperialism, while rightfully also arguing for greater attention to oppression: 

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation…. Although we are in essential agreement with Marx’s theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women. 54

At the same time, intersectionality cannot replace Marxism—and Black feminists have never attempted to do so. Intersectionality is a concept for understanding oppression, not exploitation. Even the commonly used term “classism” describes an aspect of class oppression—snobbery and elitism—not exploitation. Most Black feminists acknowledge the systemic roots of racism and sexism but place far less emphasis than Marxists on the connection between the system of exploitation and oppression. 

Marxism is necessary because it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between oppression and exploitation (i.e., oppression as a byproduct of the system of class exploitation), and also identifies the strategy for creating the material and social conditions that will make it possible to end both oppression and exploitation. Marxism’s critics have disparaged this framework as an aspect of Marx’s “economic reductionism.” 

But, as Marxist-feminist Martha Gimenez responds, “To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to ‘reduce’ gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and ‘nameless’ power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in ‘intersectionality’ is class power.” 55 The working class holds the potential to lead a struggle in the interests of all those who suffer injustice and oppression. This is because both exploitation and oppression are rooted in capitalism. Exploitation is the method by which the ruling class robs workers of surplus value; the various forms of oppression play a primary role in maintaining the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority. In each case, the enemy is one and the same.

The class struggle helps to educate workers—sometimes very rapidly—challenging reactionary ideas and prejudices that keep workers divided. When workers go on strike, confronting capital and its agents of repression (the police), the class nature of society becomes suddenly clarified. Racist, sexist, or homophobic ideas cultivated over a lifetime can disappear within a matter of days in a mass strike wave. The sight of hundreds of police lined up to protect the boss’s property or to usher in a bunch of scabs speaks volumes about the class nature of the state within capitalism.

The process of struggle also exposes another truth hidden beneath layers of ruling-class ideology: as the producers of the goods and services that keep capitalism running, workers have the ability to shut down the system through a mass strike. And workers not only have the power to shut down the system, but also to replace it with a socialist society, based upon collective ownership of the means of production. Although other groups in society suffer oppression, only the working class possesses this objective power.

These are the basic reasons why Marx argues that capitalism created its own gravediggers in the working class. But when Marx defines the working class as the agent for revolutionary change, he is describing its historical potential, rather than a foregone conclusion. This is the key to understanding Lenin’s words, cited above. The whole Leninist conception of the vanguard party rests on understanding that a battle of ideas must be fought inside the working class movement. A section of workers won to a socialist alternative and organized into a revolutionary party, can win other workers away from ruling-class ideologies and provide an alternative worldview. For Lenin, the notion of political consciousness entails workers’ willingness to champion the interests of all the oppressed in society, as an integral part of the struggle for socialism.

As an additive to Marxist theory, intersectionality leads the way toward a much higher level of understanding of the character of oppression than that developed by classical Marxists, enabling the further development of the ways in which solidarity can be built between all those who suffer oppression and exploitation under capitalism to forge a unified movement.

• The Combahee River Collective, April 1977. Quoted, for example, in Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995), 235. The statement is available online at www. circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html .
• Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), xxxiv.
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139–67.
• Ibid., 149.
• Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” 142.
• Ibid., 143.
• See, for example, Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire .
• Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Women’s Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 28-29, 1851. Quoted in Crenshaw, 153.
• Ibid., 140.
• Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment , second edition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11–12.
• Quoted in Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire , 345.
• Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Random House, 2010).
• Ibid., xix–xx.
• Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964).
• Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s  (Basic Books, 2011), 124.
• Office of Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, (March 1965).” Available online at www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/webid-m... .
• Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 1–29. Available online at www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner... .
• Combahee River Collective Statement.
• Coontz, A Strange Stirring , 140.
• Ibid., 126.
• Ibid., 101.
• Friedan, The Feminine Mystique , 263–64.
• Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 14–15.
• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 178.
• Brownmiller, Against Our Will , 272.
• Ibid., 247.
• Alice Walker quoted in D.H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 249.
• Davis, Women, Race, and Class , 188–89.
• Ibid., 178.
• Quoted in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 61.
• Davis, Women, Race & Class , 213–15.
• Rickie Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 132; Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and Susan E. Davis, ed., Women Under Attack (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 28.
• Quoted in Meg Devlin O’Sullivan, “‘We Worry About Survival’: American Indian Women, Sovereignty, and the Right to Bear and Raise Children in the 1970s,” Dissertation, (Chapel Hill: 2007). Available online at www. cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent?id=uuid:7a462a63-5185-4140-8f3f-ad094b75f04d&ds=DATA_FILE . 
• Guardian (US), April 12, 1989, 7.
• Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, et al., Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), 10.
• Davis, 204.
• Ibid., 215.
• Ibid., 175.
• Ibid., 176.
• Lydia Sargent, ed,  Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism  (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1981), 94.
• Davis, 182.
• Quoted in Davis, 174.
• Ibid., 173.
• Smith, op cit., xxxi.
• Moraga and Anzaldúa, The Bridge Called My Back , 146.
• Smith, Home Girls , 257–58.
• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement,” Lenin’s Collected Works Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 412. Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm .
• Combahee River Collective.
• Martha Gimenez, “Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy,” Race, Gender & Class (2001: Vol. 8, No. 2), 22–33. Available online at www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html .

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“If, as Black feminists contended, oppression positioned Black women at the lowest rung on the social ladder, then eradicating their oppression would necessarily ameliorate oppression for everyone” -Robert J. Patterson 

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Beverly Guy-Sheftall – Say Her Name: The Urgency of Black Feminism Now  Black feminist discourse and activism have been significant interventions in a variety of social justice movements in the U.S. since the 19th century, though this has not always been acknowledged. In the aftermath of reforms catalyzed by the Black Lives Matter Movement, a queer black feminist project, Guy-Sheftall’s talk will reflect upon the transformations in civil society, academe, electoral politics, the criminal justice system, and other spaces that have occurred over the past year as a result of recent protests around systemic racism and other issues.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor: What We Can Learn From the Black Feminists of the Combahee River Collective We continue our interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about the new collection of essays she edited that, titled How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.

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The Foundations of Black Feminism and Womanism: A Reading List

Negesti kaudo lists some pillars of womanist writing.

What does it mean to be Black, American, and a woman? While trying to answer this question, I searched retroactively, exploring the writing of womanists and Black feminists before me. The authors included on this list have lived and survived a different era of the United States of America and its tumultuous relationship with Black women. Womanism is a form of feminism that focuses on achieving equity as a community, specifically for Black women, men, and children, in contrast to feminism, which ebbs and flows to and from its original intent over the years.

The original definition of womanism is much longer and describes different versions of what a womanist can look like, which, in many ways, each of these books expands upon. This list is not definitive, and certainly not exhaustive, but the works of the following writers have helped me understand womanism, Black feminism, and my role as a Black woman artist in the movement, both now and in the future.

Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Amistad Press)

The collection includes a selection of works from 1966–1982, in which Walker writes about everything from Black art and creativity and the civil rights movement to female artists like Zora Neale Hurston and Georgia O’ Keefe. Amongst these works is Walker’s 1981 essay “Gifts of Power,” which focuses on the origins of the Shaker community in upstate New York during the late 1800s, whom she describes as womanists. Her argument is that because the Shakers were women who had left their husbands to live and commune together (chastely of course, due to celibacy) many would label them “lesbians,” but their relationship as a community of women that existed independently was something more… And to Walker, that meant they fit into a category of womanist.

bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Routledge)

bell hooks explores the history of feminism and its impact on Black women by analyzing the ways the feminist movement has consistently excluded us in order to achieve progress. But the movement’s idea of “progress” aims for women to reach equality with white men, rather than equity for Black women and black men (as well as white women). I think about this book every day since I read it. Ain’t I a Woman asks the reader to be critical of the motives behind feminism and the spaces created to serve it and teaches us if that space doesn’t serve us, how to create out own.

Ed. by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books)

If you consider yourself a womanist or a Black feminist, then this book should be on your list. How We Get Free is a timely reminder of the ways that Black women have helped organize and lead the charge for antiracism and women’s liberation. In a collection of interviews between Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and the founding members of The Combahee River Collective—a group of radical Black feminists who have been organizing since 1974—this book compares contemporary activism to that of our foremothers, exploring the legacy of Black feminism and its impact today.

Morgan Parker, Magical Negro (Tin House Books)

 This startling book of poems is a stark follow-up to Morgan Parker’s witty debut, There Are Things More Beautiful Than Beyoncé . At the 2019 AWP conference in Portland, Parker said she felt the ancestors’ presence with her as she wrote the poems in Magical Negro . The collection explores the characters of different “magical negroes” in pop culture, daily microaggressions (be they from dating a “Matt” or running into white women at the braid shop), and, in general, what it’s like to live as a Black woman in 21st-century America.

Ed. by Idrissa Simmonds, Jamila Woods, and Mahogany L. Browne, Black Girl Magic: The Breakbeat Poets Volume 2 (Haymarket Books)

Following The BreakBeat Poets Volume 1 , the editors of Volume 2 have selected a collection of poems that assert the space that Black women hold in the hip-hop world and offer various lyrical perspectives of Blackness and womanhood in America today from more than 60 writers. Insightful, inspiring, relatable, and sometimes even heartbreaking, Black Girl Magic encompasses the wealth, beauty, and range of Black women.

Mikki Kendall, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot (Viking)

Mikki Kendall’s collection of essays Hood Feminism focuses on contemporary feminism and explores the way it fails to be inclusive for all women; instead, it is positioned to support a select few. Kendall uses her own experiences to breakdown the feminist movement in a bold, but necessary, follow-up to the bell hooks’ criticism of the feminist movement in Ain’t I A Woman .

Ed. by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing (Kore Press)

As an essayist, I love anthologies, where I can find a lot of different perspectives and voices all in one place. Inspired by Octavia Butler, editors Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin asked writers to respond to the following prompt: “In the radical sum of the thinking in your work, you encourage the reader to look where no one else is looking, to tune into registers that provide critical cues for the future.” The work in this collection of radical Black women writers bends the rules of genre and explores matters of intersectionality without confining itself to the language or ideas of writing that have been made “tradition” or “canon” by popularized white writers in the past. The pieces in this collection stray away from how writers and artists are taught to understand genre and form, with each writer molding their craft to create a space in the canon carved from their own image.

__________________________________

Ripe: Essays by Negesti Kaudo is available via Mad Creek Books.

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Black Feminism: A Revolutionary Practice Essay

The Black Feminist Movement was organized in an endeavor to meet the requirements of black women who were racially browbeaten in the Women’s Movement and sexually exploited during the Black Liberation Movement. Therefore it can be said that the movement developed as a rejoinder to the above-mentioned two movements. Black women were an indistinguishable class whose survival and wants were disregarded. The purpose of the movement was to build up a premise that could effectively bring to a halt, the racist, sexist, and classist prejudice that were interrelated in their lives. The Women’s Liberation Movement has been regarded as the sole chattels of white middle-class women. If any black woman is seen drawn to this movement, it was ridiculously dealt with. This disinclination comes from the attitude that those who are subjugated cannot do the same to others. Faced with the sexism of black men and the racism of white women, black women in their relevant actions had two ways- they could either linger in the movements or strive to teach non-black or non-female companions about their requests, or they could be in possession of a movement. The first option, though dignified in its purpose, was not feasible since it was not exclusively their task to instruct the so-called class. Bringing up a Black Feminist Movement was not an easy mission. Despite the call for such a movement, few black women were eager to recognize themselves as feminists. Having determined to outline a movement in their hold, black women were required to delineate the objectives of the Black Feminist Movement and to verify its hub. The black woman ought to be strapping against the maltreatment shown to them simply for the reason of their subsistence in this world.

The white racists as well as the black nationalists categorize them as ‘Matriarchs’, as they had practically no constructive personality to authenticate their survival. Black women who crave liberation are to be self-righteous, noble, and free from all the improbable and deviant notions of prettiness and womanhood. They must not allow themselves to be kept upon a plinth, thereby allowing mocking at by those who pretend to be superior. The efficacy of the movement has not been homogeneous in the white feminist and black communities. Many white women in the feminist movement have accredited their racial discrimination and made attempts to address it in anti-racist instruction seminars. The Black Feminist Movement had to proceed through thorny paths. Most prominently, the movement was aimed to hit upon a means to expand their hold amidst the black and Third World women. The women who have little or no entry to the movement were also to be given awareness about the true nature and aim of the movement as well as resources and strategies for change through instructions. It has been tough for black women to come forward from the numerous imprecise descriptions that have reflected them as disgraceful beings. The movement was set as a target of the Black Liberation Struggle to hearten all skilled and efficient black women to emerge, strong and gorgeous, without the inferior feeling of culpable or discordant. This objective was to empower black women and enable them to mount up and reach the destination of leadership and reputation in the black community. Even though there were numerous movements for black, for example, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Nationalism, and others, all the movements were categorized under the title Black Liberation Movement. The movement, though apparently for the emancipation of the black race, was actually organized for the liberation of the black male.

The Black Feminist Movement has resulted in the formation of other similar risings intended to end oppression. In order to be again successful in its mission, the the movement had to cling to the existing male-oriented black liberation movement as well as move with its procedures. Indeed, all the black feminist movements did not reach their destination however some of them moved on and are still in motion to achieve the goal.

Works Cited

The National Black Feminist Organization’s Statement of Purpose, issued in 1973 (Customer had provided the reference).

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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IvyPanda . 2022. "Black Feminism: A Revolutionary Practice." May 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-feminist-organizations/.

1. IvyPanda . "Black Feminism: A Revolutionary Practice." May 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-feminist-organizations/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Black Feminism: A Revolutionary Practice." May 12, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/black-feminist-organizations/.

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How Black Feminists Defined Abortion Rights

By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

It will probably be months before the Supreme Court decides, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , whether to overturn Roe v. Wade. But, in this latest round of attacks on Roe, a novel line of argument has emerged: that forced pregnancy and parenthood no longer constitute a hardship for women. Lawyers representing Mississippi, the appellant in the lawsuit, describe a world that has fundamentally changed over the past fifty years, in which the burdens of parenting have been lifted and women have been empowered to have it all—to assume a career while still raising families. As for those women who would prefer not to parent, they now have the option to simply terminate their parental rights.

In a legal brief, Mississippi described a fantasy land, where “many (largely post-dating Roe ) laws protect equal opportunity—including prohibitions on sex and pregnancy discrimination in employment,” where the law guarantees parental leave, and where there is “support to offset the costs of childcare for working mothers.” The brief continued, “Sweeping policy advances now promote women’s full pursuit of both career and family.” In an interview with a local television station, the state attorney general, Lynn Fitch, added, as a flourish, “Fifty years ago, for professional women, they wanted you to make a choice. Now you don’t have to. Now you have the opportunity to be whatever you want to be. You have the option in life to really achieve your dreams, your goals, and you can have those beautiful children as well.” These would be wild claims under normal circumstances, but, in the midst of the pandemic, when child-care costs have been rising dramatically and when intermittent and impromptu school closures have forced nearly two million women out of the workforce, they are ludicrous.

According to the legal regime in Mississippi, the ability to give up one’s child for adoption cinches the final loophole in the logic of banning abortion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett added her own gloss on this claim through her questioning of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization’s lawyers, suggesting that safe-haven laws, which allow women to relinquish their infants, mean that “the obligations of motherhood” no longer “flow from pregnancy.” She continued, “It doesn’t seem to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden. And so it seems to me that the choice, more focussed, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at twenty-three weeks, or the state requiring the woman to go fifteen, sixteen weeks more and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.”

The powerful men and women championing an end to abortion seek to recast an unwanted pregnancy as an inconvenience for “professional women.” But rich women have always had a bounty of choices when deciding to end a pregnancy and when deciding to have children. Fitch, who likes to use her own story as a single mother of three as evidence that women can have it all, was able to afford day care and a nanny. It should go without saying that these are not options for poor and working-class women, who without access to abortion will lose their right and ability to control their own destiny. In 2014, three-quarters of abortion patients qualified as low-income or poor, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That year, Black and brown patients accounted for more than half of abortions performed.

That Dobbs originates in Mississippi, the poorest state in the country, twists this fairy tale into a cruel joke. In Mississippi, nearly half of women-led households live in poverty, almost twice the national average; twelve per cent of women in the state lack health insurance, compared with eight per cent nationally. Barrett’s blithe suggestion that pregnant women simply “go fifteen, sixteen weeks more” ignores, among many burdens, that pregnant women in Mississippi die at higher rates than their peers in most states, including Louisiana and Georgia. And because this case is no longer just about Mississippi, it also ignores the fact that Black women are three to four times more at risk of dying in childbirth than white women.

For poor and working-class women, a disproportionate number of whom are Black and brown, overturning Roe won’t mean that abortions will end. It will mean that safe and sound abortions in health-care facilities will move further out of reach. This dilemma has been a permanent feature of the modern movement for abortion rights. One study found that eighty per cent of deaths caused by septic abortions in New York City in the nineteen-sixties involved Black and Puerto Rican women. In Georgia, between 1965 and 1967, the Black maternal death rate was fourteen times that of white women. During this period, nurses reported that “sticks, rocks, chopsticks, rubber or plastic tubes, gauze or cotton packing, ballpoint pens, coat hangers, or knitting needles” were administered to terminate pregnancies. For these women, access to abortion was not abstract—it was a matter of life and death.

If the Roe decision had simply affirmed that access to abortion was elemental to the social equality of women, it would have become something closer to an incontrovertible right. Instead, the Justices explicitly disagreed with the appellant’s claim that “the woman’s right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses.” The twenty-one-page decision, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, considers when life begins, the potential harm experienced by unwanted children, and the right to privacy between a physician and a patient, but there is nothing about the equality of women and the ways that forced pregnancy impairs its actualization.

Within a few years, new legislation began to restrict poor and working-class women’s right to an abortion. The passage of the Hyde Amendment, in 1976, eliminated Medicaid funding of abortion except in cases in which the mother’s life is at risk. The impact was immediate. The number of abortions financed by Medicaid dropped from three hundred thousand a year to a few thousand.

In Roe, the Supreme Court claimed to want to make a dispassionate decision, one not influenced by the larger debates concerning abortion. “Population growth, pollution, poverty, and racial overtones tend to complicate and not to simplify the problem,” Blackmun wrote. In this way, the Court’s decision reflected the narrowness of the mainstream women’s movement, which viewed abortion as the singular way to measure women’s right to control their reproductive lives. In both cases, the broad range of factors constraining women’s equality was ignored, because doing otherwise would open larger and more complicated issues involving pay, family structure, social provision, and a more capacious consideration of reproductive rights. It would also require accounting for the ways that women’s equality had different meanings for women who were not white or middle class. Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicana women had different constraints and burdens in their daily lives that meant they would have different approaches to achieving liberation.

When the National Organization for Women formed, in 1966, it patterned its mission after the civil-rights strategy of changing the legal framework of discrimination. Yet even as NOW demanded a dramatic expansion of rights for women, it largely overlooked the concerns of poor and working-class women of color. This was made plain in 1969, when NOW ’s president, Betty Friedan , gave an address at a conference that marked the formation of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. She said, “As the Negro was the invisible man, so women are the invisible people in America today: we must now become visible women who have a share in the decisions of the mainstream of government, of politics, of the church—who don’t just cook the church supper but preach the sermon; who don’t just look up the Zip Code and address the envelopes but make the political decisions; who don’t just do the housework of industry but make some of the executive decisions. Women, above all, who say what their own lives and personalities are going to be, and no longer listen to or even permit male experts to define what ‘feminine’ is or isn’t.” These were certainly examples and sites of sexism, but Friedan ignored the possibility that “woman” was not a universal category as she prioritized the problems of white and middle-class women as the most urgent. And if there was any confusion over whom she was addressing, Friedan went on to explain that NOW ’s purpose was to “break out of the confines of that sterile little suburban family to relate to each other in terms of all of the possible dimensions of our personalities.”

The chasm between middle-class white women’s demands and aspirations and those of poor and working-class women of color began to be addressed by the emergence of Black feminists in the late sixties. These women, who included Toni Cade Bambara, Frances Beal, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith, argued that real equality could be achieved only by expanding the parameters of what constituted “reproductive justice” to include the entire context within which decisions about having or not having children were made. Organizations like NOW mobilized predominately white women to fight for abortion rights, but they often ignored or minimized the glaring issue of coerced or forced sterilizations, which was critical to women of color. According to a national study conducted by Princeton University in 1970, twenty-one per cent of married Black women had been sterilized. As the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts has observed, “The dominant women’s movement has focussed myopically on abortion rights at the expense of other aspects of reproductive freedom, including the right to bear children, and has misunderstood criticism of coercive birth-control policies.”

For Black feminists, many of whom had become radicalized through their involvement in the civil-rights movement, the persistent racism and sexism that they experienced compelled them to question the totality of American society, not just their place in it. In 1969, Beal penned one of the pioneering documents of Black feminism, a pamphlet titled “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Beal wrote, “it is idle dreaming to think of black women simply caring for their homes and children like the middle-class white model. Most black women have to work to help house, feed, and clothe their families. Black women make up a substantial percentage of the black working force and this is true for the poorest black family as well as the so-called ‘middle-class’ family.” This double burden, Beal continued, was ignored by many Black men, who may have seen the “System for what it really is” when it came to their own subjugation but, when it came to women, seemed to be reading “from the pages of the Ladies Home Journal .” This inattention compelled Black women to organize their own groups, set their own agendas, and develop their own strategies—what the Combahee River Collective would later describe as “identity politics.”

By the time Beal wrote “Double Jeopardy,” she and several other Black women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC ) were leaving the group because of increasingly divergent ideas about the role of women in the Black movement. Among Black men in the movement, there was a pervasive belief that Black women should follow the men’s political lead. As Beal wrote, “To assign women the role of housekeeper and mother while men go forth into battle is a highly questionable doctrine for a revolutionary to maintain. Each individual must develop a high political consciousness in order to understand how this System enslaves us all and what actions we must take to bring about its total destruction. Those who consider themselves to be revolutionary must begin to deal with other revolutionaries as equals. And, so far as I know, revolutionaries are not determined by sex.”

This was more than a debate over the women in radical politics. Beal and her women comrades were chafing against the influence of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on the state of the Black family, which included a thesis that the emasculation of Black men led them to retreat from their natural role as patriarchs, causing Black women to take leadership of their families. In his view, this gender confusion led to the collapse of Black family life, spawning criminality among men and producing unruly children. Moynihan wrote, “At the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.”

Moynihan was criticized for essentially blaming Black women for the poverty and hardship that shaped the lives of their families. In a speech a year after the report was published, the SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael said, “To set the record straight, the reason we are in the bag we are in isn’t because of my mama, it’s because of what they did to my mama. . . . We have to put the blame where it belongs.” But, for many other Black men, Moynihan provided a framework in which they could understand their marginalization and attempt to repair the damage—by reasserting their rightful positions as patriarchs. Assuming this role meant denouncing birth control and abortion as tools of genocide that compromised the future and freedom of Black families. In 1971, the comedian and activist Dick Gregory wrote a cover story for Ebony that began, “My answer to genocide, quite simply, is eight kids—and another baby on the way.” Gregory, who never quotes his wife in the article or even mentions her name, goes on to claim that birth control and abortion both had been designed to “limit the black population,” describing them casually as methods of genocide. Speaking to the U.S. Commission on Population Control, in 1971, the Reverend Jesse Jackson said, “Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.”

For Beal, a single mother of two children, and other Black feminists, reproductive freedom, including access to birth control and abortion and the right to have children on their terms, was the most basic element of self-determination in a society where their choices were heavily circumscribed by racism, gender, and class position. As a result, Black women activists not only took up the immediate questions concerning reproduction but they also raised issues about child care, employment, welfare, and the other material necessities that could help women take care of their children and choose to bring them into the world. By focussing on the plight of poor women, they made it easier to see that the struggle for abortion and reproductive freedom was about equality, not just privacy or even “choice.” Their insights into the ways that poverty and other forms of oppression limited their life chances compelled them to demand reproductive justice—which also involved the right to raise children in healthy environments where their and their parents’ basic needs could be met. It is a standard that certainly was not achieved with Roe, but is needed now more than ever.

More on Abortion and Roe v. Wade

In the post-Roe era, letting pregnant patients get sicker— by design .

The study that debunks most anti-abortion arguments .

Of course the Constitution has nothing to say about abortion .

How the real Jane Roe shaped the abortion wars.

Recent data suggest that taking abortion pills at home is as safe as going to a clinic. 

When abortion is criminalized, women make desperate choices .

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Gender Studies › Black Feminisms

Black Feminisms

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on December 16, 2017 • ( 0 )

The term ‘Black’ is radically unstable and is applied to various, related political positions. An attempt to trace the meanings that surround and inform this term involves an engagement with its geographical, cultural and political indeterminacies, with its reliance on context and time. As a locus of antagonisms and conflicts, Black feminism distinguishes itself from White or ‘First World’ feminisms, and is at once involved in cultural or national ideologies, in ways which have become increasingly complex. In order to locate and identify a phenomenon such as ‘Black feminism’, the contexts of academic convention, cultural domination and cultural currency become determinate factors. Any analysis of the recent emergence of an identifiable field of Black feminist criticism, or Black feminist politics, has to include a keen sensitivity to the marked inscriptions of difference and specificity, of connection and visibility within the field.

A major polarity in Western Black feminist thought, particularly for the British context, is that between the terminology and politics of the United States and Britain. For the purposes of United States politics, ‘Black’ is a term referring to the African-American population, whereas Asian-Americans (meaning both South Asians and, for example, Chinese, Korean, Filipina descendants), Latinas and Native Americans are categorised as ‘people of colour’. In Britain, ‘Black’ is a political category often describing Asians (referring to people of the subcontinent), Africans and Afro-Caribbeans, with often a wider inclusion of ‘non-White’ people.

The current US preference for racial categorisation based on country or continent of origin or descent, hyphenated with national identity (as in ‘African- American’) over the politicised term ‘Black’, as well as the retaining of the term ‘Third World’ for North American ‘people of colour’, at once blurs and begs the distinction between national and cultural identities. The attempt, in the British context, to sub-categorise ‘Black’ into ‘more accurate’ sections, as in the 1991 Census 1 can result in a de-politicising of the term and a further obfuscation/ exclusion of various ‘Black’ identities under a spuriously scientific ‘comprehensiveness’. The titles, ‘Black Other’, or ‘Any other ethnic group’ marks the bearer as ‘ more other than Black’.

The shifting meanings of ‘Black’ as a racial, cultural, national or political term has implications for the development and meanings of Black feminisms. The relationship between the terms ‘Black’ and ‘feminism’ allows for a sustained critique, both of the feminist movement and identities, and of Black politics.

Beginning with an anthology initially conceived in 1979, the rawness and violence of new articulations and new alliances can be traced. Moraga and Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1983) is a text of crucial importance for the staking out of what can now be acknowledged as oppositional territory. Its subtitle, ‘ Writings By Radical Women of Color ‘ immediately shifts these alliances into a political space that allows for connections ‘capable of spanning borders of nation and ethnicity’.2 What this means for an anthology emerging from United States feminist radicalism in the late 1970s and early 1980s is a reconfiguration of identity politics around ‘Third World’ immigrant women and African-American women. The internationalism of the text, its insistence that both connections and contentions with the United States will form the basis of ‘political necessity’,3 is one that is still, in 1983, a fraught and uneasy alliance of differences.

Moraga’s original Preface supports Bambara’s sentiments with a reference to White feminists as ‘so-called sisters’ (1983: xiii). The prevalent conflicts that emerge from her Introduction are reflected by other writers in the anthology and attest to the complications of both feminist movement and cultural affiliation. Moraga’s lesbian identity presents itself, crucially, as an exclusionary threat to her identification with women and men of colour. Drawing attention to a continuing political thread throughout the text, Moraga launches an attack on separatism as the luxury of White feminism and the unacceptable sacrifice of feminists of colour: ‘But the deepest political tragedy I have experienced is how with such grace, such blind faith, this commitment to women in the feminist movement grew to be exclusive and reactionary. I call my white sisters on this ‘ (1983: xiv).

The direct challenge to a White-dominated feminism and the continual calls for a more broad-based movement that allows for different cultural/racial communities and politics are significant aspects of This Bridge Called My Back . The concentration on relationships between women offers a scrutiny of class, race and cultural issues that promises to assault any notion of feminism as a stable place to usher in others.

Otherness , however, is equally not a stable place on which to build mutual identifications or communities of recognition. Many of the writers bear witness to misunderstandings and divisions between women of colour themselves. As a political grouping that amalgamates African-American, Asian-American, Latina and Native American women, ‘Women of Colour’ broaches and re-evaluates the notion of Black feminism and necessarily includes within itself urgent questions of cultural, racial and social affiliation. Brought into political visibility out of conflict with a predominantly White feminist movement, ‘Women of Colour’ do not become the automatic site of resolution.

These recognitions of difference and of conflict within difference in the context of feminism makes This Bridge an important milestone in Black feminist writing. The introduction of ‘Third World’ alongside African-American feminisms allows for a discussion of racial, economic and national issues that act as critical points of tension in defining Black feminism. The statement of Chrystos , as a Native American, that: ‘I am afraid of white people’ (1983: 68), a statement aimed at (White) feminist collectives, can be read alongside Moraga’s anxiety as a Chicana about Black lesbians: ‘Black dykes … I felt ignored me, wrote me off because I looked white’ (1983: xvii). If to be a ‘Woman of Colour’ is not (necessarily) a matter of physical visibility, the emphasis in the text slides between cultural, economic and social issues, negotiating and questioning the limits and meanings of racial identities. Black American women are represented here as another ethnicity within a larger ‘Third World’ movement, which also incorporates Japanese Americans. That Black Americans are not ‘Third World’ peoples or new immigrants allows the text to indirectly highlight the diferences between African American and Black feminisms and to insist on the non-comprehensiveness of African-American feminisms for theories and politics of race, culture or class.

Each chapter in the anthology is a self-categorisation within these limits. The repeated, ‘I stand here as … I am a …’, calls attention to a late twentieth-century preoccupation with dual or sub-national categories and with difference. Looked at from one angle the anthology bristles with conflict, with the splintering of feminism into disjointed and violently delineated groups (or individuals). Looked at again, the ‘poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians’ (Audre Lorde, in Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983: 98) allow for coalitions, for fluidity and change. The temporary nature of these un-easy alliances and identitiesspoken with such desperation and tension in 1979remain as one of the most significant challenges for Black feminism to date.

This Bridge is a useful point of departure for a chapter about late twentiethcentury Black feminisms because it reveals the difficulties and complexities that accrue to both Black and feminist identities. Moraga, in her 1983 Foreword, claims that the original conception of This Bridge is now showing its age. Erupting primarily within and against mainstream (White) feminist movement, the 1979 preoccupations did not include detailed discussion of relationships between women and men of colour. Solidarity as nonWhite women creates a focus on feminism and Black/White divisions. The differences between women of different ethnicities, and different cultural backgrounds, pushes to one side any concentrated discussion of families or communities. They become what is different from, excluded by, hidden behind.

The difficulties of an alliance that places visible against felt, remembered or hidden difference presents a problematic unity in the anthology, revealing itself particularly in certain writings by Women of Colour who do not identity (unproblematically) as Black. Rosario Morales, for example, who accounts for herself as ‘indian bones … spanish sounds’, also describes an ambiguous social position: ‘what I do remember is to walk in straight and white into the store and say good morning in my see how white how upper class how refined and kind voice all crisp with consonants bristling with syllables’ (1983: 108).

Here, the confusion of racial identity with class identity, both of which are revealed as indicative of each other, succeeds in assessing ‘true’ Black identity as being at odds with an ambiguous, invisible identity that is, nevertheless, Black, or ‘of colour’. The accepted community of Black women in other sections of the text is here disrupted with the anxiety, ‘you don’t belong’ (1983: 108). This anguished ambiguity sits uncomfortably alongside the Black Feminist Statement from the ‘Combahee River Collective’ that very clearly and coherently sets out the agenda, meaning, genesis and beliefs of Black feminist organisation, stating that the Black feminist is what is distinguishable from and between Black (male) liberation movements and the White left (1983: 211).

The consistently oppositional stance of the essays and ideas in the anthology, defining non-White female identity continually in terms of difference from (community, collective, the visible, the obvious, or the White, the male …) creates a volume that presents the rage and violence of identities in the process of selfdefinition. Placing a range of histories, familial and cultural subjectivities under the difficult banner of ‘Women of Color’ ushers in an assault on feminist politics from a range of positions. Feminist identification becomes a matter of uneasy alliances, of negotiating difference, of interpreting the meaning and validity of sexuality, class, heritage, culture and even race. The spiritual visions underpinning many of the literary and political statements attest to the dedication to alternative self-definitions that the volume attempts to represent. Gloria Anzaldúa’s reading of the Tarot (1983: 246), Cherrie Moraga’s belief in astrology (1983: 248), and the final piece of the volume, by Chrystos , direct themselves to a search for other ways of living beyond North American capitalism. Chrystos ‘s claim that ‘We have lost touch with the sacred’ (1983: 244) adds a kind of final vision to the book’s presentation of ‘alternative’ values.

This ‘alternative’, spiritual re-definition of self emerges in the writing of Alice Walker a Black feminist, or ‘Womanist’ whose contribution to Black feminist criticism and politics in the United States and beyond has been critical. Alice Walker’s rejection of the term ‘feminist’ for Black women in favour of ‘Womanist’ in her 1983 collection of essays is a response to cultural difference and the specificities of her own (Black, Southern) sense of community. With references to histories of slavery and sassiness, gardens of flowers, food and ‘the Folk’, Walker creates an essentially ‘home-grown’ vision of the Black feminist who ‘ Loves the Spirit’ (1984: xii). 4

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens , with essays written from 1970 to the early 1980s, is a collection that emphasises the significance of ‘home’, loyalty and roots. The South is the place of ‘the people’ who provide the emotional energy of the writing: ‘I see the same faces, hear the same soft voices, take a nip, once in a while, of the same rich mellow corn, or wine’ (1971: 138). Looking to the South for ‘wholeness’ (1975: 48) and for ‘continuity’ (1976: 13), Walker’s sense of herself as a ‘Black revolutionary artist’ (1971: 130) is linked indissolubly to her sense of origins and to her sense of connection with a Southern Black community and identity: ‘And when I write about the people there, in the strangest way it is as if I am not writing about them at all, but about myself. The artist then is the voice of the people, but she is also The People’ (1971: 138).

This certainty about belonging, identity and speakingfor a definable ‘people’ contrasts Walker with the conflictual, emergent and divided subjectivities that present themselves in This Bridge . Walker’s re-discovery and popularisation of Black Renaissance writers like Zora Neale Hurston have, for her, the logic of unearthing a family. In her title essay, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens , Walker’s eulogy to her mother’s un-famous artistry becomes witness not only to an American, but to a long African heritage (1974: 243). This acknowledgement of community beyond the United States and the Southern states becomes a central point of Walker’s writing, and her sense of herself as spokesperson for the community becomes a larger and more problematic claim in the context of international, or other Black feminisms.

With the publication of her novel, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992), Walker’s presentation of ‘African’ culture (in general) under American feminist judgement, reveals the difficulties of her position as spokesperson for all Black women. Her loyal allegiance to the United States in terms of ‘freedom’ and escape allows her to represent the ‘barbarity’ of African practices (including the undifferentiated practices of clitoridectomy, excision and infibulation) as part of a larger state of cultural unfreedom. Africa as victim needing American feminisman Africa to which Walker makes unhesitating claimpoints towards the dangers of internationalist Black feminism within the United States. The dimension in her previous writing of spiritual communion with her foremothers becomes a difficulty when applied over cultural and national borders. The complicated and uncertain union between the ‘Third World’ perspective and Black feminism in This Bridge can be recalled here both as a proviso and a corrective.

The institutionalisation of Black feminism in the United States becomes solidified through collections such as Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). Home Girls sets out to promote Black feminism as distinct from both a Whitedominated feminist movement and the exclusive concerns of Black men. Barbara Smith is then able to state, in 1983, that ‘we have a movement of our own’ (1983: xxxi). The choice of anthology as a form for representing Black feminisms is an important one, allowing, as in This Bridge , a range of political ideas, concerns and approaches to exist together, and giving the impression of a field in the making. As Barbara Smith puts it in her Introduction to Home Girls : ‘anthologies which bring together many voices seem particularly suited to the multiplicity of issues of concern to women of color’ (1983: xlix). This multiplicity of issues covers subjects such as lesbianism , Black women artists, the family, culture and feminist organisation.

The significance of the concept of ‘home’ in the title-one of the concepts that is central to Alice Walker’s ideaslies in the longing for, or realisation of, a place from which to speak. This place of self and recognition is also a place to claim and to own. It provides the possibility of being an insider: ‘Home has always meant a lot to people who are ostracized as racial outsiders in the public sphere. It is above all a place to be ourselves’ (1983: li).

The conflation of Black women with ‘Third World’ women in the Introduction points to a difficulty that also hovers over the language of This Bridge . Merging the identity of racial outsider with national outsider, and therefore identifying unproblematically with women of the ‘Third World’ (particularly African women) confuses the theoretical positions of United States Black feminists. The identity of ‘home’ becomes, in this formulation, a widening and elastic metaphor of possession.

However, the final piece in the collection and, in many ways, the most significant, addresses precisely this issue of home, belonging and possession. Bernice Johnson Reagon ‘s Coalition Politics: Turning the Century approaches the difficulties, dangers and necessities of feminist coalition by continually examining the meaning of ‘home’. If ‘home’ is cultural and racial security, the certainty of naming and defining, then coalition has nothing to do with ‘home’. For Reagon , speaking from a background of Black Civil Rights, the idea of feminist coalition involves the incursion of different women into feminism, its constant re-definition through conflict and flexibility. It does not, for her, involve the comfortable embracing of similar women into a safe place: ‘In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time’ (1983: 359).

Barbara Smith’s later article, Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships Between Black and Jewish Women  (1984) continues with the issue of coalition and self-examination by exploring relationships between Africa American andJ ewish women, particularly within the feminist movement. Her clear statement: ‘I am antiSemitic’ (1984: 69), does not leave her with a safe place from which to speak and allows her to discuss honestly the possibilities of alliance and conflict even competition between Jewish and Black women. Refusing the temptation of ‘ranking … oppressions’ (1984: 75), Smith’s essay considers the connections as well as the mistrust between the two groups, emphasising (with references to Reagon’s earlier piece) the positive and vital nature of coalition politics. Referring to Black women as ‘Third World’ throughout the piece allows for a clear-cut argument between two apparently internally undifferentiated groups. The category ‘Black’, then, however, operates indistinctly across national and cultural boundaries.

Carole Boyce Davies ‘s  text Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994) addresses this tendency to homogenise and delimit Blackness and Black womanhood to one particular location or cultural experience. Taking the experiences of Black women (im-)migrants as her primary example, Boyce Davies insists on the continual renegotiation of Black women’s identity between places and nations. In this way, Black womanhood and therefore Black feminism cannot become stratified to one particular history or set of preoccupations. Boyce Davies ‘s emphasis on ‘migratory subjectivity existing in multiple locations’ (1994: 4) points also to the imperative to name, place and historicise where one is speaking from and to whom. Her identification of the United States as primary signifier and therefore definer of Black feminism through publication and cultural strength is significant here: ‘Thus to identify Black women’s writing primarily with United States writing is to identify with US hegemony’ (1994: 4).

The debates throughout the 1980s in Britain around the identity of Blackness who is to be included and who ruled outtook place in the context of a conscious political movement to locate Blackness within a range of communities who were excluded in particular, racialised ways, from Britishness. Blackness as the identity of non-White othersincluding, for example, Afro-Caribbeans, Africans, Asians, Chinese placed issues of race above issues of culture, religion or origins, and created a broadbased, collective identification around racial difference:

In Britain in the 1980s, this shared sense of objectification was articulated when the racialized disempowered and fragmented sought empowerment in a gesture of politicized collective action. In naming the shared space of marginalization as ‘black’, postcolonial migrants of different languages, religions, cultures and classes consciously constructed a political identity shaped by the shared experience of racialization and its consequences. (1997: 3)

Heidi Safia Mirza ‘s Reader, Black British Feminism (1997), is organised around this inclusive interpretation of ‘Black’ as a term that operates similarly to ‘Black’, ‘Women of Colour’ and ‘Third World Women’ in the US.

The different histories behind Black feminist writing in Britain and in African countries provide different conditions for political identities. For Afro-Caribbean, Asian and African British feminists, the link with a ‘Third World’ subjectivity is nuanced, generally, by more direct familial experience than is common in Black feminist writing from the United States. The relatively short history of Black feminism in Britain, due to the more recent settlement of postcolonial migrants 5 (although the history of Black people in Britain, particularly in the port cities of Cardiff, Liverpool, Bristol, London, spans colonial history-see Fryer 1984) is inexorably tied to issues of migration, re-location, ‘origins’ and cultural difference. The cultural stake in the nation of Britain is frequently problematised as well as energised by personal or familial memories of arrival.

The anthology, Motherlands (1991), emphasises the powerful influence of ‘Third World’ origins on the writing of British feminists. The term ‘motherlands’ is linked with histories of exile, longing and displacement, and the editor, Susheila Nasta ‘s stated aim in the Introduction, to ‘generate a cross-cultural dialogue between critics and writers whether in ”First” or “Third” worlds’ (1991: xviii), reveals the intention of the book to remain sensitive to national/cultural specificities. The third section of the text, ‘Absent and Adopted Mother(land)s’, underlines the project’s concern with connections, with the liminalities of nations and homes, and with the continual renegotiation of racial and cultural identities. ‘Home Girls’, particularly in this section, gains a complicated and layered set of meanings, analysing the writing of immigrants and migrants whose home is both present and elsewhere.

The reading of African, Caribbean and Asian novels primarily explores the ‘universal’ issues and themes of motherhood, native language (or ‘mothertongue’) and the self-expression of women within the institutions of family, nation, community. The role of colonial institutions with their imposition of gendered or national identitiesplaces the criticism of these texts within a wider problematic of ‘First/Third’ world politics and power. The criticism of these texts also introduces the question of the politics of ‘First World’ criticism of ‘Third World’ texts. The difficulties of writing about (explaining, analysing) fiction from one (social/cultural) context out of another can itself risk the dynamics of imperialist encounter. The reading of Black women’s writing from the West or the ‘Third World’ has, then, to remain aware of the insights of Black and ‘Third World’ feminisms.

A text that is discussed more than once in the collection is Ama Ata Aidoo ‘s novel, Our Sister Killjoy (1977). As a narrative that charts the experiences of a Ghanaian woman in Europe, the text acts as a locus for exploring the difficulties of dialogue between White/Western and African women. Histories of imperialism and the realities of racism and exploitation underlie Sissie’s analysis of inter-continental migration and inter-racial friendship between women. The peculiarities of this text, besides its blending of poetry and prose, of letter-form, autobiographical address and third person narrative, are the simultaneous recognition of the oppression of Africa and the violence of racism, and the representation of a relationship between two women that curiously reverses the expected power structure. The merging of genres and the shift in authorial address places attention on narrative voice and expression on the importance of narrative control. In this way, the relationship between Sissie and Marija is related from a position of knowledge, with Sissie taking up a ‘masculine’ position against Marija’s emotional dependence.

The effect of this is a narrative that promotes African subjectivity to the place of observer, definer and historical judge. Reversing dominant perspectives, African female subjectivity presents European history, landscape, people and language as ethnographically strange, with Marija’s German English placed at a similar expressive disadvantage as pidgin in European ethnographies/novels. The feminism of the text is, then, deliberately and inescapably placed within specific cultural locations, at the point of conflict between dominant and subordinate national identities. ‘Black feminism’, in relation to this text, is both a reevaluation of African femininity in respect of African communities and men, and a re-examination of racial and cultural differences between women.

The letter that moves towards the conclusion of the novel emphasises Sissie’s ‘anti-western neurosis’, and her fear of the loss of African identityparticularly African femininity. As a letter addressed to an African man, the text refuses a direct engagement with the politics or feminisms of ‘the West’ and yearns instead for the autonomy of definition ‘That is why, above all, we have to have our secret language. We must create this language … So that we shall make love with words and not fear of being overheard’ (1977: 116).

However, the ‘authenticity’ of origins, of cultural identity, of race, prevail as issues within the politics of Black feminisms. Identity politics and debates over ‘mixed race’ identity, forms of racism and class complicate the broad terrain of ‘racial difference’ on which ‘Blackness’ is identified. It is here that the impact of postmodernism on Black feminisms has been, in some ways, enabling. Its corrective against identity politics, against the ‘authenticity’ of Blackness, allows for multiple Black female identities to be expressed, recognised and valorised:

A postmodern black feminist identity … is not just based on racism and oppression but on recognizing the fluidity and fragmented nature ofracialized and gendered identities. In this sense we can reclaim subjectivity from the cul de sac of identity politics and reinstate it in terms of a powerful, conscious form of political agency. (Mirza 1997: 13)

bell hooks’s essay, Postmodern Blackness , explores the relevance of postmodernist theories for Black politics. Her recognition of the threat that postmodernism imposes on Black politics is significant and exposes the difficulties and dangers of postmodernist thinking for Black feminisms. As a critique of identity politics, potmodernism can be seen to threaten the formation and sustaining of an oppositional voice against the reality of racist society and institutions. As Pratibha Parmar claims:

To assert an individual and collective identity as a black woman has been a necessary historical process, both empowering and strengthening. To organize self-consciously as black women was and continues to be important; that form of organization is not arbitrary, but is based on a political analysis of our common economic and cultural oppressions. (Parmar 1987: 68)

However, postmodernism’s deconstruction of ‘the subject’, including ‘the Black subject’, or ‘the Black female subject’ can also be seen as liberating the diversity of Black lived experience and subjectivities: ‘Such a critique allows us to affirm multiple black identities, varied black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy’ ( hooks 1991: 28 ).

The autonomy of definition is a major issue within Black feminisms. However, this issue has a range of dimensions, as this brief ‘narrative’ of Black feminisms reveals. The layering of antagonisms, of conflicts and struggles that Black feminisms have undergone, whether within the general feminist movement, within cultural/racial communities, and, finally, between continents and cultures, defies any easy definition of a politics or an identity. The insistent need for an awareness of global inequalities and cultural difference, initially called for by Black feminisms, is a difficulty and an ongoing project within and between Black feminisms. In conclusion, the novel, Our Sister Killjoy , provides a useful and telling comment on the pitfalls and dangers of defining ourselves and others: ‘I know everyone calls you Sissie, but what is your name?’ (Aidoo 1977: 131).

Source: Contemporary Feminist Theories , Jackson, Stevi. Edinburgh University Press 1998

Notes 1. ‘After consultation with the Commission for Racial Equality, among others, nine separate categories White, Black Caribbean, Black African, Black Other, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese, Any other ethnic group were decided upon’ (AngLygate 1995: 18). 2. Cherrie Moraga, ‘Refugees of a World On Fire’, Foreword to the second edition, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (eds) This Bridge Called My Back . 3. Ibid. 4. In Search of OurMothers’ Gardens , published in Britain by The Women’s Press, 1984; first published by Harcourt BraceJovanovich in 1983, xii. 5. ‘However, if genealogies span centuries, can we undertake a genealogy of Black British feminism when the immediate history of concerted black feminist activity in Britain reaches back only over the last 50 years, over the relatively short time of postcolonial migration and settlement here?’ Heidi Safia Mirza (1997: 6).

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Tags: Alice Walker , Ama Ata Aidoo , Barbara Smith , bell hooks , Bernice Johnson Reagon , Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Relationships Between Black and Jewish Women , Black British Feminism , Black Feminism , Carole Boyce Davies , Cherríe Moraga , Chicana Feminist Theory , Coalition Politics: Turning the Century , Feminism , Gloria E. Anzaldúa , Heidi Safia Mirza , Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology , In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa , Our Sister Killjoy , Possessing the Secret of Joy , Postmodern Blackness , Susheila Nasta , This Bridge Called My Back , Toni Cade Bambara , Womanist , Writings By Radical Women of Color

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• The Overview
• Art & Culture
• Environmental Justice
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• Identity & Community

Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A Manifesto

WORDS BY DR. CHELSEA MIKAEL FRAZIER

Despite having many aligned priorities, there’s an alarming lack of diversity within ecocriticism. In her manifesto,  Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier breaks down why this lack of representation has made it challenging for Black Feminist Thought and ecocriticism to find a collaborative rhythm—and how Black, African-descended women have cared about the natural environment and sustainability all along.

In mainstream films, books, and political discourse exists the erroneous notion that Black women and their communities do not care about the natural environment, sustainability, or their own health loom large. To add insult to stereotype-informed injury, Black feminist voices have often been seemingly absent from mainstream environmentalism and the intellectual movement that sprang forth from it in the early 1990s. But Black Feminist Ecological Thought has been present and continues to evolve alongside an ecocriticism that often fails to recognize its existence and its intellectual and creative authority.

Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature, art, and the environment. It is an intellectual movement that began to formally cohere in the early 1990s. Its aims included drawing attention to 1. everything being connected—especially nature and culture, 2. our definitions of humanity being rooted in our cultural norms and languages, and 3. a commitment to the health, well-being, and sustainability of our natural environments. From its inception, the movement announced itself as being universally relevant to and concerned about “all” people, but suffered from a very obvious lack of racial, ethnic, economic, and gender diversity.

Part of the reason why ecocriticism suffered from a lack of diversity, is because of its tendency to primarily highlight texts produced by intellectuals that were white (and often male) who had access to leisure time, land ownership, and financial capital. Their ideas implicitly privileged white, Western values over all others and has been very slow to perceive the existence and/or necessity of alternative strands of ecological thought—such as Black Feminist Ecological Thought.

Black feminism is an umbrella term that describes a range of social, political practices and theories that are historically rooted in and extrapolated from the experiences of Black women.

As a Black feminist scholar, when I picked up the mantle of ecocritcism, I couldn’t help but immediately notice this characteristic of the movement myself. Ecocriticism’s alarming lack of diversity made it difficult for fields like Black Feminist Thought to find a collaborative rhythm, despite having many aligned priorities. Black feminism is an umbrella term that describes a range of social, political practices and theories that are historically rooted in and extrapolated from the experiences of Black women. Because of this, it is a field that has always been interested in breaking the structural imbalances that lead to an unfair distribution of material resources. Additionally, Black, African-descended women across the Diaspora are routinely the first to confront and lead the fight against some of the most intense harmful effects of environmental degradation.

Initially, as a Black Feminist scholar, bathed in the knowledge that 1. African-descended women across the African Diaspora routinely confront some of the more intense harmful effects of environmental degradation, 2. that there were several examples of Black women environmental justice advocates and organizers leading the fight against those effects and 3. that artists and thinkers of various mediums had been doing the work of creatively documenting the first two ideas, I was generally bothered by what I perceived to be an exclusion from ecocriticism.

But I was also emboldened in my writing and activism—or writing as activism—to draw attention to the ways that these two intellectual movements, Black Feminist Thought and Ecocriticism, could and should benefit each other. Especially because both movements claimed to be committed to demystifying the structural imbalances that lead to an unfair distribution of material resources. The origins and initial purpose of Black Feminist Ecological Thought then came as a result of recognizing the ways that our dismissive and stereotypical beliefs about Black, African-descended women were also limiting the transformative potential of our environmental movements across many fields. I realized that I would have to make clear what the movement was missing out on: the foundational knowledge that Black, African-descended women were not environmental justice leaders by coincidence and it wasn’t just a result of their suffering at the hands of ecological violence. The consistency of the messages in Black women’s art suggested something deeper: it suggested that Black women’s ecological inclinations were rooted in a ecological world-sense completely alternative to what readily comes to mind when we think about the environment.

The ecological harms of misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity affect Black women extremely intensely, and those effects also guarantee a despairing destruction for all directly responsible and/or indirectly complicit.

The late Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy provides a representative example of this world-sense. A Mercy zooms in on America’s infancy and locates that infancy in the interwoven narratives of an American family in the 1690s. We meet Florens, a sixteen year old enslaved African girl laboring and living on a farm in rural New York, Jacob Vaark, the Dutch slave owner that purchases Florens and owns the farm where she works, his London-born, English wife Rebekka Vaark, and an enslaved Native American woman named Lina who also lives and works on the Vaark farm.

Throughout the novel, the farm itself—with its structures, people, flora, and fauna—also functions as a character, sometimes victim of the whims of its characters, other times the impartial container of the characters, but also the central environment that frames the happenings that shape their lives.

In the narrative, Toni Morrison juxtaposes the demise of the character Florens—a young enslaved Black girl—with the impending dysfunction of her environments, i.e. the farm. In doing this, we can read Morrison’s A Mercy as a parable that makes clear the ways that misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity are more than simply a breach in morality on a societal level. More urgently, the novel dramatizes the notion that the convergences of misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity are widespread social, economic, and ecological liabilities.

This interpretation is the kind made possible by Black Feminist Ecological Thought. Black Feminist Ecological Thought emphasizes the importance of recognizing this kind of novel as being both Ecological Art and Black Feminist Art simultaneously. Black Feminist Ecological Thought also illuminates the reasons why it is important for us to interweave both perspectives in order to discern the transformative potential of the text. In this case, the transformative potential being: the ecological harms of misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity affect Black women extremely intensely, and those effects also guarantee a despairing destruction for all directly responsible and/or indirectly complicit.

For another example of Black Feminist Ecological Thought at work, we can turn to MacArthur Genius grant-winning artist Latoya Ruby Frazier’s 2016 photo project, “ Flint is Family .” Popular images of Black mother-led families that permeate the pop cultural landscape often paint those families and the Black mothers that lead them as dysfunctional. By contrast, Latoya Ruby Frazier presents poet, entrepreneur Shea Cobb, a single mother, and her family as a functional, whole, organized, and complete unit. Additionally, Frazier’s images—with a touch of hopeful melancholia—highlight the motivation behind Shea Cobb’s ecological ethics: a tender focus on protecting her young daughter from the Flint water crisis’s poisonous effects. Frazier’s images invite viewers to reflect on the fact that the stress the Cobb family is experiencing is located in state-sanctioned ecological violence, rather than that all-too-common grammar of American life: a “shameful” Black mother.

Black Feminist Ecological Thought also reminds us that Black women are not, and have never been, passive victims of environmental degradation—nor are they and have never been the blame for a supposed breakdown of “the Black family.”

Black Feminist Ecological Thought keeps our appetites hungry for images, words, and stories like Latoya Ruby Frazier’s that meditate on the relationship between environmental harm and the everyday stresses of Black mothering. Black Feminist Ecological Thought also reminds us that Black women are not, and have never been, passive victims of environmental degradation—nor are they and have never been the blame for a supposed breakdown of “the Black family.” Instead, in “Flint is Family” we have a representation of a Black family, not the Black family, led and composed mostly of Black women and girls conceptualized as whole, functional, and complete yet straining intensely against the great chasm of environmental injustice that is the Flint water crisis.

Black Feminist Ecological Thought is neither static nor universally relevant to all things and all times. Black Feminist Ecological Thought is also not the result of “adding” Black feminist principles to ecocriticism, rather transforming both movements. As an interpretive and creative world-sense, it is committed to understanding the intersections of gender, race, and class and bringing those commitments into a larger discussion of ecocritical approaches to literature, art, and culture.

Black Feminist Ecological Thought can help us critically interpret and create not only art and literature, but can also help us to criticize (when necessary), reimagine and create other elements of culture including our legislation, our economic sensibilities, or engagement with material resources like water, flora, fauna, and land. It is about perceiving what new ideas and worlds are made possible when the commitments of these two movements are enmeshed with one another.

Practitioners must be careful however, not to limit Black Feminist Ecological Thought to the reactionary work of uncovering and unpacking ecocriticism’s (and mainstream environmentalism’s) lack of diversity and/or inattention to the ecological perspectives of Black women. Black Feminist Ecological Thought is not a reactionary response to the Eurocentric failings of mainstream ecocriticism. Black Feminist Ecological Thought illuminates and documents the ways that 1. Black women thinkers have always developed their own alternative understandings of the interconnectedness of all things and 2. these ecological understandings have centered the health, well-being, and sustainability of Black, African-descended women across the Diaspora since time immemorial.

Black Feminist Ecological Thought asks all of us to keep our eyes peeled for the very subtle ways that environmental harm and discourses around environmental harm tend to blame, neglect, or obscure Black women’s complex relationships to themselves, their families, and their environments. But Black Feminist ecological Thought has always been whispering to us—urging us to understand the interconnected points of our unwell society as a first step toward restoring our environments. The aim of Black Feminist Ecological Thought is to open more portals for us to thoughtfully confront all the melancholy and promise of ecological healing, or as Zora Hurston Neale might say, to confront all the “dawn and doom” in the branches.

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Black Feminist Thought Essay Questions

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Why is black feminism different from white feminism?

The White feminism does not consider the problems faced by black women in their everyday lives. They are not considered a part of White feminism because there is no place for the racial issues in White feminism. The black feminism includes the problems of women along with emphasizing the prejudice faced by the Afro-American women. The society compels them to choose between their African American identity and the identity of being a female.

How are black women treated in US?

Black women face the racial prejudice in schools, stores, offices and in their daily interactions. They are called as ‘mammy’, ‘matriarch’ or ‘hoochie.’ The society describe them as panthers and savage creatures. They are blamed for their own problems by the society. The US society either took them as sexless creatures or entirely focusing on their erotic passions. They are forced to live as outsider-within and are compelled to do low level jobs. They work in the houses or offices of Whites as maids or servants.

What is dialogical relationship?

Collins says that the altered experiences lead to change in consciousness. When the beliefs are changed they automatically change the consciousness. This relationship is known as dialogical relationship. There is a need for black intellectuals who would raise their voices regarding the oppression of black women. It is prerequisite to make the Afro-American women aware of the challenges and the obstacles in their way in order to change their consciousness.

How has the writer urge black women to resist?

The author has urged the black women to resist against their oppression and prejudice by referring to the black activism. Collins has given the examples of black female intellectuals, poets writers, musicians etc. The black women resisted their subjugation and achieved their status in society. They survived despite of facing the brutality and the worst treatment at the hands of Whites.

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Black Feminist Thought study guide contains a biography of Patricia Hill Collins, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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A Womanist’s Poetic, Theo-Ethical Response to Sexual Trauma: Ethics, Theology & Black Women’s Poetry

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This paper gestures towards a womanist response to a recent conversation with a friend, indicative of many black women’s experiences of sexual trauma and struggle to reconcile their identity as black women, Christians, and survivors. I put in conversation black feminist writings, womanist ethics and theology, and black women’s poetry to gesture towards a womanist response to sexual trauma. This paper makes three primary claims. First, I assert that womanist theology and ethics provides a firm foundation for Christian responses to sexual trauma. Second, I argue for contemporary womanist ethics as a crucial dialogue partner for sexual trauma survivors. And finally, I posit the moral knowledge gleaned from three black women’s poems as guides for womanist responses to sexual trauma.

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Black feminism.

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            African & African-American Feminism, The Black Woman's Search for her Identity and Role in Society.              Although women have been involved to some degree in all kinds of organizations in Africa and America from church groups to liberation movements, in many ways it was the trade union movements that became the spawning ground for women organizers and in which women first rose to positions of importance in Africa. Black women in America moved forward in the attempts of showing the importance, necessity and urgency of a movement and addressing the ways racism, sexism and classism all work together to perpetuate each other. They addressed the needs that were ignored by white women and black men in the women's and liberation movement. The struggle to correlate these two areas of black women's lives encompuses the goals and mission of each movement and therefore allows black women to be whole in their personal and political lives. The movement spawned several important organizations in the early 1970's that are committed to struggle against all forms of oppression. The organizing of women in Africa began in the 1920s, principally in the laundry, clothing, mattress, furniture and baking industries. While several black national federations were formed and dissolved, the one that endured was the Non-European Trade Union Federation, formed in 1928. Their position was that racial divisions should not split a union. They sought free compulsory education for all races and an end to employment discrimination by incorporating education and training for all races. Women were being both organized and trained to lead. However, black women who participated in the liberation movement and the women's movement in America were often discriminated against in several different ways. They were discriminated against economically, sexually, and racially. The liberation movement offered sexual discrimination towards the women through issues that mostly concerned the status and position of black men.

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• Approx Pages: 3

8. Women Studies

Throughout the history, Feminism has been a social movement. ... After one month's readings, study, journals, movies and discussions on Feminism issues, I still agree on my initial definition of Feminism, but obviously, I ignored several meanings factors of Feminism. ... "Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression." (Bell Hooks, author of Ain't I a Woman: Black Women & Feminism, 1984) Throughout history women have worked hard to improve their lives in the schools, in workplaces, and in communities. ... (Change our world, pp.504) The second wave of feminism developed among differ...

• Word Count: 441

9. Women's Liberation Movement

Popular social protests were opposition to the Vietnam war and the civil rights movements protests, which was exemplified by the struggle for black equality. ... The three main trends within the WLM were socialist feminism, liberal feminism and radical feminism; each saw women's problems in a different light and stressed different solutions. ... Liberal feminism concentrated on equal rights and attempted to bring about change in legislation and government policy. Lastly, Radical feminism saw the system of male dominance over women (patriarchy) as women's problem. ... One of the diffe...

• Word Count: 362
• Approx Pages: 1

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*Extended Deadline* Black Feminist Excesses

Black Feminist Excesses

(MLA 2025 Proposed Working Group)

This working group aims to theorize excess, desire and unbridled being in Black feminist and womanist studies. How does Black feminism and womanism engage disparate, wayward, or fringe forms of identity, embodiment, materiality, affect and culture?  How can concepts like ‘indulgence’ or ‘aspiration’ be considered or troubled among current theoretical frameworks? What do you think is on the horizon for Black feminist and womanist thought in moving beyond the postfeminist moment?

Participants are asked to present on their works-in-progress or new-ideas-in-motion in a salon style format, where feedback and discussion across projects will be the focal point. Participants may also submit their remarks or a different piece for a proposed post-working group digital zine. 

Topics include be are no means limited to: 

-Queer studies and transfeminist thought

-The postfeminist moment

-Aesthetics and visual culture

-Print and material cultures

-Musicology, sound studies, musical entertainment

-Social media trends like Black Women in Luxury, the Soft Black Girl or #HotGirlSummer

-Internet cultures and Digital Humanities

-Black women and travel

-Black beauty care, hair care, fashion

Please submit abstracts up to 300 words and a bios up to 200 words by March 26th, 2024. You can email materials and questions to  [email protected]  Everyone is welcomed to apply, but graduate students, junior scholars and NTT are especially encouraged.