If the white groups do not realize that they are in fact fighting capitalism and racism, we do not have common bonds. If they do not realize that the reasons for their condition lie in the system and not simply that men get a vicarious pleasure out of “consuming their bodies for exploitative reasons” (this kind of reasoning seems to be quite prevalent in certain white women’s groups), then we cannot unite with them around common grievances or even discuss these groups in a serious manner because they’re completely irrelevant to the black struggle.
THE NEW WORLD
The black community and black women especially must begin raising questions about the kind of society we wish to see established. We must note the ways in which capitalism oppresses us and then move to create institutions that will eliminate these destructive influences.
The new world that we are attempting to create must destroy oppression of any type. The value of this new system will be determined by the status of the person who was low man on the totem pole. Unless women in any enslaved nation are completely liberated, the change cannot really be called a revolution. If the black woman has to retreat to the position she occupied before the armed struggle, the whole movement and the whole struggle will have retreated in terms of truly freeing the colonized population.
A people’s revolution that engages the participation of every member of the community, including man, woman, and child, brings about a certain transformation in the participants as a result of this participation. Once you have caught a glimpse of freedom or experienced a bit of self-determination, you can’t go back to old routines that were established under a racist, capitalist regime. We must begin to understand that a revolution entails not only the willingness to lay our lives on the firing line and get killed. In some ways, this is an easy commitment to make. To die for the revolution is a one-shot deal; to live for the revolution means taking on the more difficult commitment of changing our day-to-day life patterns.
This will mean changing the traditional routines that we have established as a result of living in a totally corrupting society. It means changing how you relate to your wife, your husband, your parents, and your coworkers. If we are going to liberate ourselves as a people, it must be recognized that black women have very specific problems that have to be spoken to. We must be liberated along with the rest of the population. We cannot wait to start working on those problems until that great day in the future when the revolution somehow miraculously is accomplished.
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.
Old people, young people, men and women, must take part in the struggle. To relegate women to purely supportive roles or to purely cultural considerations is dangerous doctrine to project. Unless black men who are preparing themselves for armed struggle understand that the society which we are trying to create is one in which the oppression of all members of that society is eliminated, then the revolution will have failed in its avowed purpose.
Given the mutual commitment of black men and black women alike to the liberation of our people and other oppressed peoples around the world, the total involvement of each individual is necessary. A revolutionary has the responsibility not only of toppling those that are now in a position of power, but of creating new institutions that will eliminate all forms of oppression. We must begin to rewrite our understanding of traditional personal relationships between man and woman.
All the resources that the black community can muster up must be channeled into the struggle. Black women must take an active part in bringing about the kind of society where our children, our loved ones, and each citizen can grow up and live as decent human beings, free from the pressures of racism and capitalist exploitation.
Mary Ann Weathers
Mary Ann Weathers’s essay “An Argument for Black Women’s Liberation as a Revolutionary Force” was included in the chapter on “Radical Feminism,” which New York—based Leslie Tanner assembled for Voices from Women’s Liberation (1970), one of the earliest publications from the newly emerging women’s liberation movement. It had also been published in No More Fun and Games in 1969. Tanner’s collection of papers were read and circulated in women’s “consciousness raising” (CR) groups that met regularly on the Lower East Side in New York City and demonstrates an early strategy of the women’s movement. CR, described in detail in Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood Is Powerful (1979) began in 1966 among a small group of radical women (in the privacy and safety of their homes) who wanted to enable women to understand that the personal was indeed political, and that women’s oppression was tied to the existence of a “sex class system” which needed to be dismantled. In the process of putting together Voices, Tanner became angered by the absence of women in history books and decided to include in her anthology feminist voices from the past; she included over thirty selections from the United States and England, and only one black voice, that of Sojourner Truth. The premise of the book was that all women are “sisters,” despite class differences, because of their common experience of oppression. This major tenet of “second-wave” white feminism in the 1970s would be challenged by women of color and others.
Weathers’s essay challenges the black liberation movement to embrace women’s liberation which she hoped would be responsive to the needs of all oppressed people.
AN ARGUMENT FOR BLACK WOMEN’S LIBERATION AS A REVOLUTIONARY FORCE
“Nobody can fight your battles for you; you have to do it yourself.” This will be the premise used for the time being for stating the case for black women’s liberation, although certainly it is the least significant. Black women, at least the black women I have come in contact with in the movement, have been expounding all their energies in “liberating” black men (if you yourself are not free, how can you “liberate” someone else?). Consequently, the movement has practically come to a standstill. Not entirely due however to wasted energies, but adhering to basic false concepts rather than revolutionary principles, and at this stage of the game we should understand that if it is not revolutionary it is false.
We have found that women’s liberation is an extremely emotional issue, as well as an explosive one. Black men are still parroting the master’s prattle about male superiority. This now brings us to a very pertinent question: How can we seriously discuss reclaiming our African heritage—cultural living modes which clearly refute not only patriarchy and matriarchy, but our entire family structure as we know it. African tribes live communally where households, let alone heads of households, are nonexistent.
It is really disgusting to hear black women talk about giving black men their manhood—or allowing them to get it. This is degrading to other black women and thoroughly insulting to black men (or at least it should be). How can someone “give” one something as personal as one’s adulthood? That’s precisely like asking the beast for your freedom. We also chew the fat about standing behind our men. This forces me to the question: Are we women or leaning posts and props? It sounds as if we are saying if we come out from behind him, he’ll fall down. To me, these are clearly maternal statements and should be closely examined.
Women’s liberation should be considered as a strategy for an eventual tie-up with the entire revolutionary movement consisting of women, men, and children. We are now speaking of real revolution (armed). If you cannot accept this fact purely and without problems, examine your reactions closely. We are playing to win and so are they. Viet Nam is simply a matter of time and geography.
Another matter to be discussed is the liberation of children from a sick slave culture. Although we don’t like to see it, we are still
operating within the confines of the slave culture. Black women use their children for their own selfish needs of worth and love. We try to live our lives, which are too oppressing to bear, through our children and thereby destroy them in the process. Obviously the much acclaimed plaudits of the love of the black mother has some discrepancies. If we allow ourselves to run from the truth, we run the risk of spending another 400 years in self-destruction. Assuming of course the beast would tolerate us that long, and we know he wouldn’t.
Women have fought with men, and we have died with men, in every revolution, more timely in Cuba, Algeria, China, and now in Viet Nam. If you notice, it is a woman heading the “Peace Talks” in Paris for the NLF [National Liberation Front]. What is wrong with black women? We are clearly the most oppressed and degraded minority in the world, let alone the country. Why can’t we rightfully claim our place in the world?
Realizing fully what is being said, you should be warned that the opposition for liberation will come from everyplace, particularly from other women and from black men. Don’t allow yourselves to be intimidated any longer with this nonsense about the “Matriarchy” of black women. Black women are not matriarchs, but we have been forced to live in abandonment and been used and abused. The myth of the matriarchy must stop, and we must not allow ourselves to be sledgehammered by it any longer—not if we are serious about change and ridding ourselves of the wickedness of this alien culture. Let it be clearly understood that black women’s liberation is not antimale; any such sentiment or interpretation as such cannot be tolerated. It must be taken clearly for what it is—pro-human for all peoples.
The potential for such a movement is boundless. Whereas in the past only certain type black people have been attracted to the movement—younger people, radicals, and militants. The very poor, the middle class, older people, and women have not become aware or have not been able to translate their awareness into action. Women’s liberation offers such a channel for these energies.
Even though middle-class black women may not have suffered the brutal suppression of poor black people, they most certainly have felt the scourge of the male-superiority-oriented society as women, and would be more prone to help in alleviating some of the conditions of our more oppressed sisters by teaching, raising awareness and consciousness, verbalizing the ills of women and this society, helping to establish communes.
Older women have a wealth of information and experience to offer and would be instrumental in closing the communications gap between the generations. To be black and to tolerate this jive about discounting people over thirty is madness.
Poor women have knowledge to teach us all. Who else in this society see more and are more realistic about ourselves and this society and about the faults that lie within our own people than our poor women? Who else could profit and benefit from a communal setting that could be established than these sisters? We must let the sisters know that we are capable, and some of us already do love them. We women must begin to unabashedly learn to use the word “love” for one another. We must stop the petty jealousies, the violence, that we black women have for so long perpetrated on one another about fighting over this man or the other. (Black men should have better sense than to encourage this kind of destructive behavior.) We must turn to ourselves and one another for strength and solace. Just think for a moment what it would be like if we got together and internalized our own 24-hour-a-day communal centers knowing our children would be safe and loved constantly. Not to mention what it would do for everyone’s egos, especially the children’s. Women should not have to be enslaved by this society’s concept of motherhood through their children; and then the kids suffer through a mother’s resentment of them by beatings, punishment, and rigid discipline. All one has to do is look at the statistics of black women who are rapidly filling the beast’s mental institutions to know that the time for innovation and change and creative thinking is here. We cannot sit on our behinds waiting for someone else to do it for us. We must save ourselves.
We do not have to look at ourselves as someone’s personal sex objects, maids, baby sitters, domestics, and the like in exchange for a man’s attention. Men hold this power, along with that of the breadwinner, over our heads for these services, and that’s all it is—servitude. In return we torture him, and fill him with insecurities about his manhood, and literally force him to “cat” and “mess around” bringing in all sorts of conflicts. This is not the way really human people live. This is whitey’s thing. And we play the game with as much proficiency as he does.
If we are going to bring about a better world, where best to begin than with ourselves? We must rid ourselves of our own hang-ups, before we can begin to talk about the rest of the world and we mean the world and nothing short of just that. (Let’s not kid ourselves.) We will be in a position soon of having to hook up with the rest of the oppressed peoples of the world who are involved in liberation just as we are, and we had better be ready to act.
All women suffer oppression, even white women, particularly poor white women, and especially Indian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Oriental, and black American women whose oppression is tripled by any of the above mentioned. But we do have female’s oppression in common. This means that we can begin to talk to other women with this common factor and start building links with them and thereby build and transform the revolutionary force we are now beginning to amass. This is what Dr. King was doing. We can no longer allow ourselves to be duped by the guise of racism. Any time the white man admits to something, you know he is trying to cover something else up. We are all being exploited, even the white middle class, by the few people in control of this entire world. And to keep the real issue clouded, he keeps us at one another’s throats with this racism jive. Although whites are most certainly racist, we must understand that they have been programmed to think in these patterns to divert their attention. If they are busy fighting us, then they have no time to question the policies of the war being run by this government. With the way the elections went down, it is clear that they are as powerless as the rest of us. Make no question about it, folks, this fool knows what he is doing. This man is playing the death game for money and power, not because he doesn’t like us. He couldn’t care less one way or the other. But think for a moment if we all go together and just walk on out. Who would fight his wars, who would run his police state, who would work his factories, who would buy his products?
We women must start this thing rolling.
Linda La Rue
Linda La Rue discusses in “The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation” (1970) the frustration of some blacks with the emergence of the middle-class women’s liberation movement, whose origins could be traced to John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women (1961), which Eleanor Roosevelt chaired; the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963); the addition of “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (to prevent job discrimination based on gender); and the founding, in 1966, of the National Organization for Women (NOW), whose first president, Betty Friedan was replaced in 1970 by a black woman, union organizer and civil rights activist Aileen Hernandez. Novelist Toni Morrison also raised questions about the white-dominated women’s movement in “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” (New York Times Magazine, 22 August 1971). This distrust of white women, a legacy of slavery, explained in part the ambivalence of many black women about the emerging movement, in which they felt marginalized There was also a belief that the women’s movement had helped to eclipse the black movement, which was perceived to be in disarray in some circles. La Rue, a graduate student in political science at Purdue University when she wrote “The Black Movement,” also objected to the analogy drawn in then current feminist literature between the oppression of women and the oppression of blacks.
THE BLACK MOVEMENT AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION
Let us first discuss what common literature addresses as the “common oppression” of blacks and women. This is a tasty abstraction designe
d purposely or inadvertently to draw validity and seriousness to the women’s movement through a universality of plight. Every movement worth its “revolutionary salt” makes these headliner generalities about “common oppression” with others—but let us state unequivocally that, with few exceptions, the American white woman has had a better opportunity to live a free and fulfilling life, both mentally and physically, than any other group in the United States, with the exception of her white husband. Thus, any attempt to analogize black oppression with the plight of the American white woman has the validity of comparing the neck of a hanging man with the hands of an amateur mountain climber with rope burns.
“Common oppression” is fine for rhetoric, but it does not reflect the actual distance between the oppression of the black man and woman who are unemployed, and the “oppression” of the American white woman who is “sick and tired” of Playboy foldouts, or of Christian Dior lowering hemlines or adding ruffles, or of Miss Clairol telling her that blondes have more fun.
Is there any logical comparison between the oppression of the black woman on welfare who has difficulty feeding her children and the discontent of the suburban mother who has the luxury to protest the washing of the dishes on which her family’s full meal was consumed?
The surge of “common oppression” rhetoric and propaganda may lure the unsuspecting into an intellectual alliance with the goals of women’s liberation, but it is not a wise alliance. It is not that women ought not to be liberated from the shackles of their present unfulfillment, but the depth, the extent, the intensity, the importance—indeed, the suffering and depravity of the real oppression blacks have experienced—can only be minimized in an alliance with women who heretofore have suffered little more than boredom, genteel repression, and dishpan hands.
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