THE HISTORY OF FEMINISM AND RACE

American feminists often refer to their history as comprising three “waves.”The first wave occurred between 1790 and 1920. During this period, feminism overtly excluded women of color and was, at times, explicitly racist. The second wave took place between 1950 and 1980, and it began to address social divisions among women based on race. Unfortunately, these attempts at inclusion resulted in a fragmentation of feminism itself. The third wave began after 1980, and it will need to be inclusive across race if feminism is to remain credible as a movement for all women, even though scholarly work by feminists has historically supported a diversity of feminisms.

The first wave began with Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1790 publication in England of Vindication of the Rights of Women . Wollstonecraft was inspired by the promise of universal human equality in the philosophies that motivated the French Revolution. She argued for the education of girls and the entry of wives and mothers into public life, with full rights as citizens. The philosopher and English political activist John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869. Both Wollstonecraft and Mill argued for child custody rights for divorced women, independent property ownership for married women, and suffrage for all women, precisely so that they could better serve their families and contribute to society as wives and mothers. However, those advocating for such rights were focused solely on white middle-class women, who had become overly domesticated and confined to their households after the Industrial Revolution. Wollstonecraft and Mills did not apply their arguments to poor women or women of color, who had always worked outside their homes in fields or factories, or in the homes of white women. For most of these women, such work was necessary to help support their families.

Women did achieve the right to vote in both the United States and Great Britain by 1920. According to the historian Eleanor Flexner, in Century of Struggle (1974), as a social and political movement, the achievement of suffrage developed by fits and starts, in ways that were closely related to the abolitionist movement to free the American slaves. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott emerged as the leaders of the suffrage movement after the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York. Susan B. Anthony was the great organizer of this movement, while Stanton supplied much of its rhetoric. The Seneca Falls Convention had occurred, at least in part, because female abolitionists were frustrated at not being able to speak publicly against slavery. (Public speaking was generally a privilege reserved for men.) The suffragists were bitterly disappointed that the rights of women were not recognized when slavery was abolished, and some veered toward racist comparisons between themselves and uneducated blacks after blacks were granted suffrage.

As the first wave grew on a state by state basis in the second half of the nineteenth century, a strong women’s club movement took shape, especially when temperance, or the outlaw of alcoholic beverages, became a women’s issue (many women saw men’s drunkenness as a problem for their families). These clubs were mainly restricted to white women. African American women formed their own clubs and civic organizations to secure education in their communities, protest against lynching, and create social standards for new generations (see Hine 1993).

Despite the racism within the first wave of the women’s movement, the second wave, as a political movement that brought American women into the workforce and secured entry into higher education, was inspired and assisted by the civil rights movements of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, outlawed discrimination “because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”On the theoretical and ideological side, the second wave was inaugurated in the early 1950s through the publications of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex . Friedan proclaimed that the domestic lives of middle class women obstructed human fulfillment and de Beauvoir argued that women’s social differences from men, which were based on ideas about their biological differences, resulted in a second-class status compared to men.