Did second-wave feminism leave out women of colour?

The short answer

• A movement built in the image of its founders. The first texts and organisations of the second wave were created by educated white women, and they naturally began from their own experience of suburban isolation, professional exclusion and unwanted pregnancy. Women whose main problems were racism, poverty or coerced sterilisation found those concerns missing from the agenda. Friedan’s book, for example, said almost nothing about the millions of women who already worked for wages. No movement can see experiences that its members do not share unless someone forces them on to it.
• The pull of other loyalties. Black and Chicana women were often active in civil-rights, Black Power and Chicano movements, whose leaders, male and female, frequently argued that feminism was a white middle-class luxury that would divide their communities. This pressure discouraged women of colour from joining white-led organisations and also made organising as feminists within their own movements difficult, which is why they so often created separate groups. Many also feared that criticising Black or Chicano men in public would hand ammunition to racists who already portrayed their communities as disordered.
• The same issue meant different things. Mainstream feminists saw abortion as the central reproductive right because unwanted pregnancy was their main risk. Poor women of colour also faced pressure in the opposite direction, from doctors and welfare officials who wanted them to have fewer children. Similarly, paid work meant liberation for the suburban housewife and hardship for the domestic worker. A movement that takes one group’s experience as universal will misread the needs of every other group.
• Exclusion inside the organisations. Lesbians were pushed to the margins of NOW in 1969 and 1970, and women of colour reported being treated as tokens or ignored at meetings and marches. These experiences convinced many that reform from within was impossible and that only autonomous organisations, led by the women most affected, could represent them. Exclusion pushed people out, but it also pushed them to build. Even NOW’s first Black president, Aileen Hernandez, elected in 1970, later left the organisation, criticising its failure to take up the concerns of minority women.

What it changed

From reproductive rights to reproductive justice. Campaigns by groups such as the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse won federal rules in 1978 requiring a 30-day waiting period, consent in the patient’s language and a ban on sterilising people under 21. In 1994 Black women activists coined the term “reproductive justice” to describe the right to have children, not to have them, and to raise them safely, a direct descendant of the arguments of the 1970s.

Houston, 1977: inclusion in the official agenda. At the federally funded National Women’s Conference in Houston in November 1977, delegates adopted a “minority women” plank drafted by Black, Latina, Asian American and Native American women, which Coretta Scott King was among those to champion. It was the most diverse gathering in the movement’s history, and also the moment conservative women organised the counter-rally that defined the backlash of the next chapter.

A literature that changed feminist theory. Writers including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, whose anthology This Bridge Called My Back appeared in 1981, made the critique of white feminism central to feminist thought. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of “intersectionality” (1989) gave it a name that spread worldwide, which shows that ideas formed at the margins can eventually reshape the centre. Their essays are now among the most widely taught texts of the whole movement.

Fragile institutions. The organisations of this chapter were small and poorly funded: the NWRO went bankrupt in 1975, the NBFO dissolved by the late 1970s and Combahee ended in 1980. Their ideas spread through books and later movements, while their practical demands, such as an adequate income for mothers, were largely defeated, culminating in the welfare cuts of the 1990s. Ideas can outlive the defeat of the organisations that produced them, which is one reason the history of a movement should be judged over decades.