The World Split Open (52 page)

One of the more pernicious consequences of the term “postfeminism” was that it completely ignored the vibrant feminist sensibility that had emerged and was still growing among racial minorities in the United States. Although the second wave of feminism initially grew out of problems encountered and addressed mainly by white women who had
achieved middle-class status, it didn't take long for women of different ethnic and racial backgrounds to reinvent feminism for themselves. Nor did it take them long to realize that
their
historical burden and
their
culture had created different problems, obligations, and needs that partly overlapped with those of white women, but mostly did not.

The awakening consciousnesses of minority women, at least on the surface, appeared to have much in common. Women in nearly every racial group—including African-Americans, Chicanas, Filipinas, Asian Americans, American and Alaskan indigenous tribes, and Puerto Ricans—first discovered, much as had white women, that their status in New Left or liberation or independence movements was one of subordination. Since the men in these groups already felt emasculated by the economic discrimination they encountered in a white-dominated culture, the women hesitated to further threaten their sense of manhood. But they were also not willing to turn themselves into mere followers. Creating and sustaining egalitarian relationships in these movements proved extremely difficult. Wanting to support their men, but unwilling to defer to them, the women faced a dilemma. Their most common solution was to work with poor women and children among their people and to publicize what they most needed. In this way, they could combine their loyalty to their movement, directly help other women, and still retain their independence as organizers and leaders.

But first they needed to know their history, so they could understand how they came to be in these situations. Ever since slavery, for instance, black women had borne the burden of working to support their families, often with husbands who could not find jobs or training in white America. Black women often dreamed of spending more time, not less, with their families. Learned helplessness was
not
the problem of women who had spent the last century holding together families, churches, and communities. And the work for which they received wages—taking in laundry or cleaning white women's homes—was hardly glamorous or self-fulfilling. To black women, as historian Paula Giddings put it, Friedan's advice to find a meaningful career “seemed to come from another planet.” The novelist Toni Morrison succinctly summarized the differences separating the lives of white and black women.

Aggression is not as new to black women as it is to white women. Black women seem able to combine the nest and the adventure. They don't see conflict in certain areas as do white women. They are both safe harbor and ship, they are both inn
and trail. We, black women, do both. We don't find these places, these roles, mutually exclusive. That's one of the differences. White women often find if they leave their husband and go out into the world, it's an extraordinary event. If they've settled for the benefits of housewifery that precludes a career, then it's marriage or a career for them, not both, not
And
.
²⁴

As early as 1970, quite a few African-American activists were already considering whether feminism had anything to contribute to their lives. The poet and writer Nikki Giovanni was typical in rejecting the women's movement, saying that she didn't want to get involved in the “white family quarrel.” Other writers and activists—like Frances Beale, Linda La Rue, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Celestine Ware, Angela Davis, Toni Cade (later Bambara), Charlayne Hunter, Toni Morrison, and Maxine Williams, among many others—took up the challenge of exploring and articulating the “double jeopardy” of black women's lives. In their view, pervasive racism was their greatest problem. This is what kept them and their men from learning the skills, joining unions, and earning the salaries that could improve the lives of their families and communities.

In 1970, the black lawyer and civil rights activist Eleanor Holmes Norton argued that

Black women cannot—must not—avoid the truth about their special subservience. They are women with all that implies. If some have been forced into roles as providers or, out of insecurity associated with being a black woman alone, have dared not develop independence, the result is not that black women are today liberated women. For they have been “liberated” only from love, from family life, from meaningful work, and just as often from the basic comforts and necessities of an ordinary existence. There is neither power nor satisfaction in such a “matriarchy.” There is only the bitter knowledge that one is a victim.

She also urged African-Americans to “remake the family unity, not imitate it. Indeed, this task is central to black liberation.” But many African-American women were still outraged at the government's publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report, “The Negro Family:
The Case for National Action.” Concerned about rising unemployment and crime among blacks, Moynihan located the problems of African-American life
not
in racism or in discrimination, but inside the black family, and blamed black matriarchs for dominating their families ever since the end of slavery: “The Negro family has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole.” In response, angry black women refuted the accusation that they had “castrated” black men and exposed what they called “the myth of black matriarchy.” As the writer and activist Maxine Williams wrote, black women “had gotten authority in the family by default,” because black men could rarely find jobs in white America. But this hardly constituted real power. When some black men also blamed them for their domination of the family, women activists grew even angrier. In 1970, the writer Linda La Rue argued that to confront racism and capitalism, black men would have to cease stereotyping black women as either “a matriarchal villain or a step stool baby-maker.”
²⁵

In the same year, the African-American writer Celestine Ware published
Woman Power: The Movement for Women's Liberation.
In a chapter called “The Relationship of Black Women to the Women's Liberation Movement,” she noted how long African-Americans had tried to imitate whites, and how they had internalized the belief that lighter-skinned blacks were more attractive and more talented. “Joining the Women's Liberation Movement,” Ware wrote, “may seem at this time like a reentry into the old farce of pretending to be white.” Ware also raised the objection that “poor black women are too occupied struggling for essentials—shelter, food and clothing—to organize themselves around the issue of women's rights.” To white feminists, she explained that “black feminism would be another attempt by the power structure to divide black men and women. Feminist goals, like abortion on demand and easily obtainable birth control, are viewed with paranoid suspicion by some black militants at a time when they are literally fighting for their lives and looking everywhere to increase their numbers.”

Still, Ware tellingly revealed the ways in which black women felt devalued and degraded in their own culture, called “black bitches” by black men who sought out white women. “Black men,” she wrote,

pursue white women not simply as the most beautiful women and easy, but also as the symbols of the white man's privileges. White women and black women have been accepting
this without criticism, but now black women are becoming increasingly vocal in their anger at this manipulation. Most white women still are not aware of the nature of black man's desire for them.

Ware also criticized black men's unwillingness to share leadership. Ware learned, for instance, “that whenever a black girl becomes too articulate and aggressive at our meetings, a boy from the group is assigned to seduce her and then, as his conquest, keep her in a more traditional position within the organization.” In short, black women—whether as domestics, heads of households, welfare mothers, or militant activists—found themselves facing many problems that had not been addressed by white feminists. “Black and white women can work together for women's liberation,” Ware wrote, “but only if the movement changes its priorities to work on issues that affect the lives of minority-group women.”
²⁶

Though few black feminist consciousness-raising groups existed during these years, those that did were already debating the issues Ware had outlined. When the Black Unity Party, a black nationalist organization in Peekskill, New York, decided that “none of the sisters should take the pill” (so that they could produce more black warriors), a group of black women in a Mount Vernon group—including Patricia Haden and Rita Van Lew, both welfare recipients, Sue Rudolph, a housewife, Joyce Hoyt, a domestic worker, Catherine Hoyt, a grandmother, and Patricia Robinson, a housewife and psychotherapist—denounced the party's demand. The women took a strong stand against black men's insistence that they avoid birth control or abortion.

If we practice birth control, it's because of poor black men . . . who won't support their families, won't stick by their women. . . . Poor black women would be fools to sit up in the house with a whole lot of children and eventually go crazy, sick, heartbroken, no place to go, no sign of affection—nothing.
²⁷

At the same time, La-neeta Harris, a thirteen-year-old Mount Vernon schoolgirl, wrote a manifesto demanding sex education in junior high school so that black girls would be able to continue their educations. “Some people say,” she wrote, “what you don't know won't hurt you but
it will and affect many other girls. . . . We have got to move on schools before they [boys] move on us. Sex education should be taught in school.”
²⁸

Disappointed by male militants blinded by their sexism, and by white feminists ignorant of their racism, a number of black women activists took up the challenge of defining and describing their own reality as black and female. Which was more oppressive, being black—or being a woman? And why on earth should black women have to choose?

For white feminists, Maxine Williams pointed out, “marriage and the family are the roots of women's oppression, while to black women of the middle class that thought is abhorrent and to black lower-class women their oppression is completely racial.” Black women, Williams continued, had always found themselves “fighting the beauty standard of white western society.” The slogan “Black Is Beautiful” had provided them with a new ideal of black beauty, natural hair and all. “But there is a catch!” Williams insisted. “She is still being told to step back and let the Black man come forward and lead.”
²⁹

In a widely reprinted essay, “Double Jeopardy: Black and Female,” Frances Beale analyzed the double oppression that black women faced. As a former nonviolent civil rights activist, Beale could hardly ignore the fact that the rise of black power groups had resulted in a decline in black female leadership. “There seems to be some confusion in the movement today as to who has been oppressing whom,” she wrote. “Since the advent of black power, the black male has exerted a more prominent leadership role in our struggle for justice in this country. He sees the system for what it really is for the most part. But where he rejects its values and mores on many issues, when it comes to women, he seems to take his guidelines from the pages of the
Ladies' Home Journal
.” Beale warned that “those who are exerting their ‘manhood' by telling black women to step back into a domestic, submissive role are assuming a counterrevolutionary position.” Like Williams, Beale also sought some way to communicate with white feminists. In her view, white middle-class women didn't seem to grasp that male chauvinism was not the main enemy.

The economic and social realities of the black woman's life are the most crucial for us. It is not an intellectual persecution alone; the movement is not a psychological outburst for us; it is tangible; we can taste it in all our endeavors. We as black
women have got to deal with the problems that the black masses deal with, for our problems in reality are the same.
³⁰

But the writer Pamela Newman had a slightly different perspective. “Ask yourself, have you ever been told, this is a man's conversation, so be quiet or keep out because woman's work is only dishwashing, sewing or laundry? This, my sister, is male chauvinism, not by the system but by the brothers. . . . The exploitation of black women goes deeper than that of white women.”

African-American women soon found a way of employing their double jeopardy on behalf of themselves and other women. Some of these women worked for the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), which had begun in the mid-1960s. As growing numbers of African-American mothers assumed full responsibility for their children, they faced a hostile, intrusive, and recalcitrant bureaucracy. The NWRO tried to help poor women fight red tape that denied eligible mothers assistance, challenge unlawful exemptions, and restore some sense of dignity to them. For a variety of reasons, the NWRO began to collapse during the early 1970s, leaving welfare recipients at the mercy of an even less tolerant atmosphere toward welfare.

In addition to welfare activism, black women targeted child care, police repression, and medical care.
³¹
They also took an active part in shaping feminism in national organizations. In 1970, NOW members elected Aileen Hernandez as their president. Flo Kennedy maintained a high-profile and influential presence in the women's movement, as did Pauli Murray, Addie Wyatt, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Shirley Chisholm, a black politician who in 1972 became the first African-American woman to run for president. By their presence, these women ensured that black women's problems would not disappear from the political agenda.