The World Split Open (53 page)

With the collapse of the black nationalist movement, African-American women felt freer to take a second look at the sexism within their own community. In 1973, activists founded the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which, within a year, had spawned ten local chapters and had held a national conference. A few years later, the writer and activist Michelle Wallace candidly described some of the conflicts that this national organization was never able to resolve. Some of its members wanted the organization to have mass appeal, attracting new members from the ranks of black women. They were quite dismayed when Margaret Sloan, an editor at
Ms.
magazine, known for
singing a love song to her white female lover on local television, was elected president. Some of the members, according to Wallace, also had competing loyalties—to
Ms.
magazine, Radical Lesbians, the Socialist Workers' Party, or NOW, “in that order.” Wallace also observed that the NBFO was like “a lot of feminist groups in that the . . . non-lesbians spent most of their time being intimidated or feeling guilty for fear of some deeply buried anti-lesbian feeling.” Just as early feminists had felt the ghost of New Left activists in their midst, many NBFO members felt “white feminists peering over our shoulders every time we talked. ‘That wouldn't be right for our white sisters,' was a frequent cry. Each proposal had to withstand the following test: had white women done it and would white women like it?”
³²

In 1974, a breakaway group of black lesbians from NBFO formed the Combahee River Collective and began organizing and writing against racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class oppression. Though they never developed into a large group, they became widely known for their radical critique of American culture and society. In their initial “Collective Statement,” they declared their independence from all other groups, but refused to embrace any kind of separatism: “The most general statement of our politics at the present time,” they wrote,

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 oppression that all women of color face.
³³

African-American women soon became engaged in what was now called “the black family quarrel.” When Elaine Brown assumed the leadership of the Black Panther Party in 1975, some men labeled her a lesbian because she appointed women to leadership roles. She then began to reassess her earlier denunciations of feminism.

I had joined the majority of black women in America in denouncing feminism. It was an idea reserved for white women, I said, assailing the women's movement, wholesale, as either
racist or inconsequential. . . . Now I trembled with fury long buried. . . . The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as being black and poor.

Michelle Wallace, the author of
Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman
(1978), attributed the failure of the black nationalist movement to the tough, militant attitude of black men and their compulsion to bed white women. When she first wrote the book, Wallace argued that “there is a profound distrust, if not hatred, between black men and black women that has been nursed along largely by white racism but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of blacks about the sexual politics of their experience in this country.” Later, she reconsidered her analysis, concluded that black self-hatred had harmed the movement, and offered a far more nuanced explanation of what writer Ralph Ellison had described as the “invisibility of the American Negro.”
³⁴

The search to integrate race and gender issues took a giant step forward when in 1983 Alice Walker described women of color as “womanists,” rather than feminists. To Walker, the very word “feminism” conjured up an image of a white movement with different priorities. But the word “womanist,” she explained, grew out of the black folk expression that mothers often used with their female children. “You acting womanish,” a mother would say to her daughter, which meant that the youngster was engaging in outrageous, audacious, or
willful
behavior.

Who was this African-American woman, so invisible to white women and black men? This was the question at the heart of so many of the novels, poetry, essays, and criticism written by African-American women during the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The title of a well-known anthology expressed it best:
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, and Some of Us Are Brave
, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith. Viewed collectively, this stunning literary renaissance, which included writers like Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Maya Angelou, to name but a few of the most famous writers, revealed new aspects of African-American women's history, experiences, relationships, families, and communities. Coupled with the powerful social, literary and historical criticism written by bell hooks, Patricia Williams, Barbara Christian, Bonnie Thornton Dill, Marsha Houston, Johnnetta Cole, Elizabeth Higginbotham, Sarah Watts, Mary Berry, Darline Hine, Angela
Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, Paula Giddings, Nell Painter, and many other scholars, black women substantively created a new feminist scholarly agenda.
³⁵

As one might expect, the work of artists and scholars would excavate all kinds of hidden injuries that black women had faced. They publicized, for instance, the forced sterilization of poor welfare women, the hideous treatment of welfare mothers, the unspoken widespread incest in rural and urban communities, the impoverishment of black women and their children, and the violence committed by male activists against the “sisters.” Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize—winning novel and the film
The Color Purple
enraged many black men for exposing the internal oppression and abuse that existed within some families. Toni Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for all her work, including
Beloved
(1987), which was a brilliant literary evocation of African-American history, as experienced by and understood through the travail of a slave mother.

Although some early black women activists, under pressure from nationalist groups, had argued that the women's movement was wholly irrelevant to their lives, that wasn't the opinion of ordinary community-based African-American women who expanded the concept of “women's issues” to include environmental justice, antigun legislation, and community struggles for decent shelter, adequate nutrition, safe schools and neighborhoods. Black women, as it turned out, consistently supported feminist goals with greater enthusiasm than white women. Year after year, black women demonstrated more support for women's issues than any other group of women in the United States. As women who had almost always worked, they viscerally understood the bitter experience of economic exploitation, the nightmare of finding child care, the humiliation of caring for white women's children when their own children cried out for them. They
lived
the double jeopardy that Frances Beale had described.
³⁶

Questioning women's position was in the air and few women who lived in the country could avoid it, especially if they were engaged in movements committed to social change. Young Mexican-American female antiwar activists began to address “women's issues” as early as 1967, questioning their role as cooks, caretakers, “busy bees,” and secretaries
within the newly organized Chicano movement. “We don't want to lead, but we won't follow,” was the way one woman put it. Meeting separately, some of these young women decided that they didn't want to split the unity of the growing Chicano movement by joining the “white” women's movement. But nor were they willing to be treated as second-class citizens.
³⁷

Decades earlier, the term “Chicano” had been a racial slur. Now, young Mexican-American activists embraced with pride words that had been used to insult them.
Chicanismo
emphasized cultural pride as a source of political unity and crystallized the essence of a nationalist ideology that viewed Chicanos as an internal colony under the domination of, and exploited by, the United States. To be Chicano meant to engage in active resistance, not to be resigned to one's fate.

The issues Chicanas addressed overlapped with, but also differed from those of African-Americans. While black women lived with the brutal legacy of slavery, Chicanas felt the burden of a different history, that of a colonized people whose land had been stolen, and that of an immigrant group who had faced fierce racial discrimination. While black women sought to strengthen weakened families, Chicanas viewed the strong Mexican-American family as the backbone of their resistance against white America. At the same time, they also viewed the Chicano family as the bulwark of a Catholic and male-dominated culture that prevented them from using contraception, having abortions, and carving out more independent lives. Still, many Chicanas viewed the survival of La Raza, the Mexican-American people, as their highest priority. Maria Varela, an activist in the Chicano movement in the Southwest, put it this way:

When your race is fighting for survival—to eat, to be clothed, to be housed, to be left in peace—as a woman, you know who you are. You are the principle of life, of survival and endurance. . . . for the Chicano woman battling for her people, the family—the big family—is a fortress against the genocidal forces in the outside world. It is the source of strength for a people whose identity is constantly being whittled away. The mother is the center of that fortress.
³⁸

As they fought for better schools and against the Vietnam War, Chicanas became increasingly politicized. Tanya Luna Mount, one high-school activist, expressed her outrage at the number of Mexican-American
men who were being killed in Vietnam, rather than educated. “Do you know why they [the Board of Education] have no money for us? Because of a war in Vietnam 10,000 miles away, that is killing Mexican-American boys—and for WHAT? We can't read, but we can die! Why?”
³⁹

On August 29, 1969, the Chicano Moratorium, which called for the immediate end of the war, held a peaceful antiwar protest rally in Laguna Park in East Los Angeles. Police rioted, fired on women and children, shot tear gas canisters into nearby bars, and ended up wounding sixty people and killing three Chicanos. Activists in the Chicano movement felt sickened and outraged. The pivotal Moratorium offered painful proof that Chicanos did not even enjoy the freedom of assembly. Out of such disillusionments, especially in Texas, grew La Raza Unida, a third political party that fielded candidates in southwestern and western states, in order that Mexican-Americans might govern themselves.

Meanwhile, many young Chicanos joined Cesar Chavez's La Causa, the United Farm Workers' (UFW) campaign to organize farm workers in the agricultural fields of Delano, California. By the late sixties, the movement was gaining considerable momentum. Together, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta had organized strikes and boycotts, and achieved some victories against the state's powerful agribusiness interests; a few growers had finally realized that they would have to employ unionized farm workers. Within the UFW were strong and effective women organizers, most famously Dolores Huerta, the vice president of the UFW. Huerta informed the men in the UFW that she had no intention of taking over, but would not simply follow male leaders: “We will lead together.” Huerta also understood that women were key to organizing the farmworkers; they not only worked in the fields, but also desperately wanted a different future for their children.

As the growing student Chicano movement embraced a stronger cultural nationalism, Chicanas sometimes found themselves cast as women of a mythical Aztec homeland who were supposed to follow the strong male warriors. Some Chicanas already suspected that
Chicanismo
could be oppressive to women activists. The activist Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez described what happened when a group of women met at the First National Chicano Youth Conference in Denver in 1969, an event that, in the view of some, gave birth to cultural nationalism. When women emerged from the Chicana Workshop, they simply stated, “It was the consensus of the group that the Chicana woman does not want to
be liberated.” “I felt this as quite a blow,” Longauex y Vasquez wrote. “I could have cried. Surely we could at least have come up with something to add to that statement.” But as she puzzled over the announcement, she realized that “liberation” to these women meant isolating themselves from the men of the larger Chicano movement. It also symbolized alienation and rupture from community, family, and tradition, and this they would not accept.
⁴⁰

That didn't mean that Chicanas were willing to be led or dominated. By 1970, Chicanas had organized the Comisión Femenil Mexicana (Mexican Women's Commission), a platform “for women to use for thinking out their problems, to deal with issues not customarily taken up in regular organizations, and to develop programs around home and family needs.” Soon the Comisión became a catalyst for a growing movement of Chicana feminists.
⁴¹

Like African-American women, Chicanas often felt torn between their own needs and ambitions as women and their loyalty to their community. Some young women resented what they viewed as a culturally sanctioned male domination of women. As activist Nancy Nieto explained, in an article titled “Macho Attitudes,”

When a freshman male comes to MECHA [a national Chicano student organization], he is approached and welcomed. He is taught by observation that the Chicanas are only useful in areas of clerical and sexual activities. When something must be done there is always a Chicana there to do the work. “It is her place and duty to stand behind and back up her Macho!”. . . . Another aspect of the macho attitude is their lack of respect for Chicanas. They play their games, plotting girl against girl for their own benefit. They use the movement and Chicanismo to take her to bed. And when she refuses, she is a
vendida
[sellout] because she is not looking after the welfare of her men.
⁴²