African American Women: Evaluating Historical Writings to Better Understand How They Balanced Two Movements and Created A Women’s Movement of Their Own

By: Maddie McNamee

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It is no secret that the United States has a dark history that we tend to erase from our memories and our textbooks. Though, no history of the United States has been silenced quite as much or quite as long as that of the African American woman. While it can be argued that the primary reason for this is that women as a whole have been silenced for the majority of American history, it is important to understand that the plight of African American women has been far greater than we have been taught in our high school history classes. Some common responses to the silencing of this important history are “The past is the past, we need to move forward,” or “You can’t erase history, so let’s just forget it and move on.” These statements, while seemingly harmless off the cuff, are part of the reason that the division between African American women and the rest of society is still so deep today. It is imperative that we look to the past in order to understand the present and repair the immense amount of damage we have done. In recent decades, there has been a steady trickle of scholarship surrounding the struggles, challenges, successes, and work of African American women. These works are providing insight and inspiration to historians who are coming to terms with just how wrong we have gotten history so far. We have seen scholarship on the unimaginable damage that slavery caused, the struggle to be included in the fight for suffrage in the 1920s, the personal becoming political with work in World War II in the 1940s, and even the exclusion from the domestic ideal in the 1950s. All of these events seemed to be leading up to an explosion of a movement for African American women. However, when the civil rights movement came full swing in the 1960s, the voices of African American women were once again overshadowed. Today, we think of the voices of Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, and Malcolm X who displayed an immense amount of courage and perseverance to fight for the rights of African Americans. While this is true, what happened to the voices of African American women? They did not disappear, nor did they stay silent. They were fighting two battles and in recent years, an explosion of narratives has surfaced on this very subject. However, this explosion is still just a drop in the ocean that is African American women’s history. Evaluating historical writings on the women’s liberation movement and the civil rights movement can help us better understand how balancing these two movements simultaneously, ultimately led to African American women creating a women’s movement of their own, which created a division that continues to impact the lives of African American women today.

The women’s rights movement, otherwise known as the women’s liberation movement or second-wave feminism, was a movement based in the United States that spanned from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. This wave sought to gain more freedom and opportunities for women. Coincidentally, this movement happened around the same time as another well-known movement that sought to gain more freedom and opportunities for African American’s: the civil rights movement. Despite this being a major turning point in history for the lives of African American women, it is perhaps not surprising that there has been minimal scholarship on the subject compared to that of other histories Americans have deemed significant. While we often hear the general retelling of the events that unfolded, including the infamous speeches sit-ins, and protests, we hear very little about the women who were behind these events. In Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, Alice Echols not only writes African American women into the narrative of feminism, but she also portrays them as the inspiration behind radical feminism in America. According to sociology professor Wini Breines, “Alice Echols ‘Daring to be Bad’ about youthful, grassroots women’s liberation activism in the Northeast is, I believe, the only full-length history of the radical feminist movement.” While Breines later learns this is not necessarily the case and that scholarship on the genre is on the rise, her difficulty finding discussion on the topic as a scholar is evidence of the lack of knowledge surrounding the topic. It is for this reason that Echols narrative proves significant and worthy of study. In this book, written in 1984, Echols illustrates yet another facet of the movement that left women divided. She touches on issues of pornography, abortion, lesbianism, and other controversial topics and suggests that it was African American women whose grit, perseverance, and courage in the face of adversity inspired such a controversial movement, despite initially not wanting to be included in it after a long history of being excluded. This unique outlook is explained in the first chapter, stating,

“Of course, it may seem ironic that black women, whose example so inspired white women to fight for sexual equality, were often unresponsive or antagonistic to feminism. Evans maintains that black and white women lacked the trust necessary to make a common cause. But, more important, they lacked a common history. The rise of black power in 1966 further disinclined black women from becoming involved in the women’s movement. Of course, this situation did change and by the late ‘70s there had emerged a dynamic black feminist movement.”

If white women were claiming black women were the inspiration for the movement, women like Breines could not seem to find their voices around the time that she published “Sixties Stories’ Silences: White Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power” in 1996. In this article, she states, “We need accounts by women, who are more likely to explore the subjective ramifications of gender and sex and race, that provide deeper, and more painful, insights into social-movement politics. Ironically then, not only white men’s but radical white women’s written silences about second-wave feminist history have reproduced the female invisibility in the new-left and sixties movements that was a central factor in calling feminism into existence in the first place.” It could be argued that there is a reason that the voices of the white women involved in these movements have been so quiet. As we continue to learn more and more about this time period, we see that African American women may not have been as antagonistic or opposed to the movement as historians have originally thought. Instead, we are learning that it was not necessarily a matter of opposition towards women’s rights, but an opposition towards both the civil rights movement and feminist movements that continually excluded them and the issues they cared about from their agendas.

In “Second Wave Black Feminism in the African Diaspora: News from New Scholarship,” Benita Roth attempts to set the record straight by claiming that African American women were not opposed to feminism. In fact, she suggests that they perhaps possessed greater feminist attitudes than white women of the time, saying, “The myth of Black women’s hostility to feminism was based on the fact that they didn’t join the white feminist organizations in large numbers, but formed their own” and “the ‘self-defined standpoint’ of resistance that Black feminist developed based on their everyday experiences generated feminist thinking that was different from that of ‘mainstream’ (white) feminists, especially in its understanding on the interlocking oppressive systems of race, class, gender and sexuality in Black women’s lives.” Roth claims that African American women saw issues with both the white feminist movements and the civil rights movement. The white feminist movements seemed to be completely ignoring economic and survival issues faced by the black community and the civil rights movement seemed to be moving towards gender politics that resembled that of the white, middle class. In an article specifically devoted to analyzing the gender differences in attitudes towards black feminism, this is idea is expanded on, stating, “For decades, the women's liberation movement reflected white, middle-class bias in its objectives and aims. Its membership and leadership treated the interests of black women as secondary to their own by excluding them from the movement's agenda. Even today, these factors would likely influence the feeling thermometer rating for the women's liberation movement by black women.” While these women could have conformed to the narrow-minded thinking that was prevalent during this time, they refused to settle for movements that were only confronting half of the problems they were facing. This, in turn, inspired a separate movement that was all-encompassing to the issues they wanted to address. Roth’s article provides a new understanding of how African American women created a movement of their own, stating, “Black feminists thus organized out of dissatisfaction with liberationist and/or nationalist movements that wished to silence some of their concerns while supposedly liberating them. In their organizing on the margins, as Springer (in press) points out, they appropriated resources where they could, created new ones where they could, and found time in the interstices of busy lives to fight against oppressions that reinforced each other.” Roth’s review of more recent scholarship helps us understand how perspectives have changed regarding this matter. This is imperative as it helps to measure progress and analyze how thinking has changed.

The scholarship following the first few decades after the women’s liberation movement shows us that there were misconceptions about the involvement of African American women, so the question begs to be asked how these misconceptions were addressed and revisited at the turn of the century. As we have seen, much of the work in the late 20th century seemed to circle around the idea that white women believed that black women did not want to be a part of the movement because of a lack of trust and an unshared history, and black women believed that white women were excluding them from the movement by failing to address the issues that they faced every day. Wini Breines, as previously quoted, thought that perhaps the answer to facing these misconceptions was to hear both sides of the story. A member of the Bread and Roses socialist feminist group, Breines herself was wedded to feminist ideals and recognizes that perhaps she was naïve to assume that her positive memory of the movement was two-sided, asking herself, “Did I believe that black and white women were ‘the same,’ and what does that mean? Is this another case of a white woman innocently longing for racial togetherness who does not take responsibility for understanding her own complicity in the racial divide, particularly in feminism, by ignoring differences of power, especially her own relation to African-American women?” narrative is important because it provides us with a deeper understanding of the role that white women thought that they were playing in these two movements. It helps us identify that there have been biases in history thus far and should motivate us to correct these narratives. She clearly states in the introduction of this article how aware she is that the analysis that she presents will be asymmetrical, yet her work is still important in gaining a more expansive understanding. Breines starts off by giving a detailed description of the Bread and Roses socialist feminist group and then goes into a detailed, slightly more distanced description of the Combahee River Collective, a black socialist feminist group that came about a few years after Bread and Roses dissolved. Throughout her analysis, she identifies areas where, in retrospect, the actions of her and her white counterparts could be seen as damaging or hurtful to African American women, such as their tendency to enter into relationships with black men, which “created hostility and suspicion on the part of black women toward black men and white women.” She concludes her careful analysis with an answer to the questions she asked herself in the beginning, stating, “Many white feminists were ‘innocently’ and consciously, if abstractly, antiracist. From the perspective of African Americans, it was an innocence in which only privileged whites can indulge and is thus suspect: abstractness impaired white women’s understanding of the reality of the lives of women of color, which, in effect was racist. The fact is that black and white women did not know each other.” While admittedly asymmetrical, Breine's perspective on the movement fills in puzzle pieces that we are still continuing to piece together today. She provides a necessary point of view that explains why our initial interpretation of this creation of a separate movement was misconstrued and why our interpretation has been consistently changing ever since.

As we have worked our way through the scholarship of African American women during the 60s and 70s up until the turn of the century, it is beneficial to compare some work published close to the movement to the work of today in order to fully grasp exactly how much our interpretation has changed. Comparing different written histories that are decades apart can help us gauge our growth and change in understanding the evolution of African American women’s role in society since the separation of the women’s movement. Written in the movement’s waning years, an article written by Margaret A Simons titled “Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sisterhood,” helps us see how this exclusion of African American women from the women’s liberation movement was perceived to have occurred right as the movement was dying down. Similar to Alice Echols, Simons analyzes the reluctance of these women to join the white feminist movement through factors such as, “fear of dividing the minority community, lack of knowledge of feminism, the relationship of black and Latina women to the church, and among black women, the focus on male liberation in the black social movement of the sixties, and the idea of black matriarchy.” In her analysis, Simons aligns herself with what we have come to recognize as the preconceived notions of African Americans’ involvement in the liberation movement. She highlights the African American women’s experience with slavery and emphasizes their hesitation to join a predominantly white movement after a history dealing with not only sexism and classism, but racism too. In the conclusion of her article, Simons illustrates a possible solution that we can see being put to use in more recent works today. She states, “If the feminist movement is to realize its dream of becoming an intercultural, international movement, we will have to confront the ethnocentrism and racism within feminism on both the theoretical and the personal/practical level.” Comparing this work to work published in the 21st century helps us see exactly where we stand today on the interpretation of this separate feminist movement.

It is works such as Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All by Martha S. Jones that provide us with the hope that Simon’s vision of interculturalism despite the false interpretations of the past are coming to fruition. She attempts to move away from this theoretical idea that being a woman in the United States is a shared experience and instead, writes a narrative that assumes this is a known fact and instead illustrates the personal stories that can attest to this.Jones’s extensive narrative is sure to tell the stories of prominent figures, such as women’s rights and voting activist Fannie Lou Hamer, lawyer and activist Pauli Murray, law professor Patricia Roberts Harris, college student Vivian Malone, and dozens of other teachers, writer, organizers, and activist whose work during the 50s and 60s paved the way for women today. Jones concludes her narrative with a statement that leaves the reader with hope, stating, “Black women continue to innovate, challenge, and lead American politics to its best ideals in our own moment. Today’s political culture reflects the wave, the surge, the storm of Black women who claimed their places in American politics after enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Perhaps Jones’s narrative is a direct response to that of Simons’s work. Vanguard is an extensive analysis of African American women’s history through the lens of political power that helps us understand how we got to an era where something like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was possible. In several of the scholarly works that cover this far-reaching topic, the importance of political power was constantly at the forefront, whether that be highlighting the lack of it that African American women seemingly always had, the ways in which they manipulated it to their advantage, and eventually, the ways in which they persevered to gain some. Vanguard is a book that not only revolves around African American women and political power but it is also the embodiment of the political power African American women have today, as it is written by a prominent African American woman who is a historian and legal scholar. It is the hope that more scholarship like this will be published so that a more accurate representation of women in during the women’s liberation movement and civil rights movement can be seen.

By looking back at how African American women simultaneously balanced the women’s liberation movement and the civil rights movement in the mid-20th century and evaluating the scholarship surrounding the era, we can better understand why and how African American women decided to create a women’s movement of their own, how that division impacted the lives of African American women today. Further, this can help us realize how more scholarship on the matter can help further our understanding. After evaluating several sources that covered this expansive topic, a common trend presented itself and an understanding of what needs to be done in order to bridge the gap between this silenced history and the rest of American history. The trend that was noticed throughout all of these sources was that there were several misconceptions surrounding black women’s involvement in feminism that led to further division and further frustration among both white women and black women. The most common misconception that can be seen throughout several sources were those revolving around the reasons African American women distanced themselves from the movement. Several sources seek to address these misconceptions and it seems as if with each passing decade, more light continues to be shed on this matter. New perspectives are offered, frustration is shown, and conversations are being had. Another common trend identified is that there is simply a lack of scholarship on the matter which makes it difficult to fully comprehend these misconceptions. Each of these works find commonality in the blank pages that seem to take up the book of African American women’s history. While this might sound discouraging, the mere fact that we, as a society, have addressed the lack of scholarship on this subject is a step in the right direction. Today, we still see the division that occurred due to these misconceptions, but we are met with a new way of looking at this division. Yes, the division grew out of distrust, misunderstanding, and anger, but it simultaneously empowered black women everywhere and inspired a revolution that ensures the voices of African American women can no longer be silenced.

Bibliography

Breines, Wini. "Sixties Stories' Silences: White Feminism, Black Feminism, Black Power." NWSA Journal 8, no. 3 (1996): 101-21. Accessed May 1, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316463.

Breines, Wini. "What’s Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, and Feminism in the Movement Years." Signs 27, no. 4 (2002): 1095-133. Accessed May 1, 2021. doi:10.1086/339634.

Echols, Alice. Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America: 1967-75. University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

Jones, Martha. Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. Basic Books, 2020.

Roth, Benita. "Second Wave Black Feminism in the African Diaspora: News from New Scholarship." Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity, no. 58 (2003): 46-58. Accessed May 1, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4548095. Simien, Evelyn M. "Gender Differences in Attitudes toward Black Feminism among African Americans." Political Science Quarterly 119, no. 2 (2004): 315-38. Accessed May 1, 2021. doi:10.2307/20202348.

Simons, Margaret A. "Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sisterhood." Feminist Studies 5, no. 2 (1979): 384-401. Accessed May 1, 2021. doi:10.2307/3177603.