The World Split Open

by Ruth Rosen

  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.

  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

  DIVIDED LOYALTIES

  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 ag
ainst 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