Discontent and Division in Feminism

Between the readings concerning civil rights, sex, and the move to radicalism, I focused particularly on the division between mainstream Feminism and the broader Women’s Rights Movements.  The frustration with Feminism is not a recent phenomenon, as bell hooks remembers in  Ain’t I a Woman? I think any discussion on feminism should include if not begin with the limitations of Feminist theory as it is generally understood.

 It is not by innocuous that a Google image search of “feminism” yields mostly photos of Rosie the Riveter.  Born out of 1940s war propaganda, she became the widely recognized symbol of feminism that women are capable of doing the same manual labor as men.  However, while the question of women’s physical capabilities was one at the forefront of that era of feminism, it failed to address the circumstances of all women in the country.  It erased the experience of black women of who, since the start of the country, were unquestioningly expected to work side by side with men.  The title of bell hooks’ 1981 work reflects on Sojourner Truth’s powerful assertion in 1851 that still rings true today.  The larger experience of black women and all women of color in America is ignored by the mainstream concerns of feminism.  As exemplified by Rosie, middle class white women’s concerns trump feminist conversation.  The lack of black feminist voice and participation in feminist movements was often brushed off to lack of concern or understanding of women’s issues.  However, hooks and Davis are sure to explain that, rather, black women have historically faced an impossible task, in the face of colonization and imperialism, of leading – let alone being heard within – a national woman’s movement. 

Systemic barriers to productively participating in a national movement are of particular importance to especially marginalized groups.  While feminism generally sought to promote women’s equality to men, women of color fighting for basic human rights did not see their grievances advanced to a national platform.  Davis emphasizes the importance of recognizing not only the goals of the larger group, but also those on the margins, specifically black and poor women.  She asserts that this will increase the cohesion of the group, so that all women may rise out of oppression together, with those at the top pulling up those at the bottom, so to speak. 

Beyond addressing the issues of those typically considered minority for whatever reason, Davis instructs us that it is of particular importance for those women “at the top” – students, and professional women, upper middle class women – to actually accept leadership from those marginalized women they typically overlook.  This is the basic idea that prompted black women to promote a new, revamped Women’s Movement that would seek to further benefit all of humanity, regardless of race and gender.  Davis promotes the importance of recognizing common goals of a movement, but also how particular problems affect some populations more than others, namely poor and black women.  This notion is the basis for the term coined by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, “intersectionality” which appreciates how the many forms of discrimination simultaneously interact in an individual’s life and may not be separated.

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.

(Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, 1989. P149)

Davis and hooks remind us of the importance of advancing issues affecting all populations, not just a particular class of women.  Davis has readers visualize a pyramid, with white bourgeoisie women at the apex and racially oppressed women at the bottom.  Only when the position of those at the very bottom advances does the entire pyramid shift towards a common goal. 

I think it is important to remember this notion in future readings and discussions of radicalism both in the US and Latin America.  I am particularly interested in how more radical movements did or did not incorporate marginalized members.  In the future, I will be looking for hierarchical patterns in other radical movements and how leaders were and were not successful in advancing movements as a whole.