CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 5
5.2 Defining feminism(s)
5.3.1 Race and class - absent indicators in feminist discourse
The global vision of women uniting across the world to fight a “common cause” upheld by western feminists was challenged in contexts within the first world such as Britain and the United States where women of colour began to speak out about the racism they endured at the hands of their feminist sisters.
Particularly during the 1980s, there was a strong drive by African American women “to unearth and eradicate the assumption that women share an essence that transcends socioeconomic location, historical location, and other variables...” (Armour 1999:16).
Feminist theory, argued African American scholars, did not speak for “women” because it did not include race in its analysis. Race, they argued, indelibly shaped “women’s
experience” and had to be accounted for.
No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women. We are rarely recognized as a group separate from black men, or as a present part of the larger group “women” in this culture.
When black people are talked about, sexism militates against the
acknowledgement of the interests of black women; when women are talked about racism militates against the recognition of black female interests. When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women. No where is this more evident than in the vast body of feminist literature (hooks 1981:7).
African American women have spent the past two decades trying to socialize themselves back into existence through texts that affirm who they are in the present and the contribution they have made to the women’s movement in the past in the United States. It was the damning critiques in the landmark texts of Angela Davis (1981) and bell hooks (1981) that alerted white feminists that all was not well within the feminist movement. Both Davis (1981) and hooks (1981) showed that being a woman meant significantly different things for white women and black women - they shared a different history in which they were exposed to different kinds of social control (Armour 1999:17).
Slavery poignantly highlighted white women’s lack of sympathy and in fact complicity in black women’s oppression. When black women were exposed to extreme forms of sexual exploitation by their white masters, plantation mistresses aligned themselves with their husbands over and against black women for economic gain. “In most slaveholding homes, white women played as active a role in the physical assaults of black women as did white men. While women rarely physically assaulted black males slaves, they tortured and persecuted black females. Their alliance with white men on the common ground of racism enabled them to ignore the anti-woman impulse that also motivated attacks on black women”
(hooks 1981:39). There was passive collusion in the sexual exploitation of black women by white men, and the active torture, ill-treatment, and persecution by white women, during slavery.
Davis (1981) shows how this inherent racism amongst white women continued into the Suffrage Movement which potentially could have united women across race and class (see also Aptheker 1982; Giddings 1984). Instead, the Movement embraced racism which was evident throughout its history, yet in spite of this, black women “supported the battle for
suffrage until the very end” (Davis 1981:145). This does not mean that black women took a passive stance towards this racism by their white sisters. They used the suffrage campaign to which they were committed as a public platform to comment on the existing racism amongst women themselves. Davis (1981:60-64) poignantly describes the incident at the Women’s Convention in Akron in 1851 involving Sojourner Truth who boldly stood up when even white women were afraid to do so. In response to the argument by a leader of the
provocateurs that it was ridiculous for women to desire the vote since they could not even walk over a puddle or get into a carriage without the help of a man, Sojourner Truth made her famous “And ain’t I a woman?” speech (Davis 1981:61):
I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most of them sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? (Stanton et al 1881:52).
In making this speech, she was refuting the assertion that female weakness was incompatible with suffrage as well as making a scathing comment on the white women in attendance at the Convention for their the racist attitudes and complicity in her sufferings as a black woman (Davis 1981:62). This powerful commentary on the vastly different socio-historical location and experience between white and black women laid the foundation for the contemporary critique of a global vision for all woman across race and class.
This damning critique is extended by Davis (1981) and hooks (1981) who in these landmark texts “exposed solidarity amongst women across racial lines as a rarely realized romantic idea” and importantly argued that the racist legacy in which white women colluded has crucial implications for the second wave of feminism in the United States (Armour 1999:17).
Patricia Hill Collins (2000) has more recently reinforced this point and argued that because of their very different histories, black and white women experience very different
stereotyping which has to be considered in attempting to forge alliances across race and
class.3
Within the British context, issues of alliance across race and class have also been
substantially addressed by black feminists. However, the history of the dialogue is different from and more recent than that within the United States. In Britain, concerted black feminist activity “reaches back only over the last 50 years, over the relatively short time of
postcolonial migration and settlement...” (Mirza 1997:6). More importantly, postcolonial settlement brought together women of colour from various contexts - Africa, Asian-Indian, and the Caribbean. During the 1980s, these marginalized groupings within Britain joined forces in collective political action to the counter racism they were experiencing. And so
“[i]n naming the shared space of marginalization as ‘black’, postcolonial migrants of
different languages, religions, cultures and classes consciously constructed a political identity shaped by the shared experience of racialization and its consequences” (Mirza 1997:3).
Mirza (1997:3-4) argues that as “a political articulation, it appeared strategic,...[but] in terms of community and personal identity ‘black’ remains contested space”. Struggles of who could or should be termed ‘black’ raged for over a decade in multi-cultural Britain. There is of course a parallel debate in the South African context which has taken a variety of twists and turns through the various stages towards political liberation (see section 5.4).
3 In the North American Canadian context these issues are dealt with by Agnew (1993).
However, in the early stage of black British feminist activity, there was a strategic
articulation of critique by women who were not white against white socialist feminists, the most vocal academic feminist voice during the 1980s. They were criticised for their lack of recognition of the very different experience in the home and in the labour market of women
“other” than themselves. Hazel Carby (1982) focussed her argument around the family, patriarchy, and reproduction which were key areas of the then current feminist discourse challenging white feminists theoretical claim to universal womanhood, while at the same time excluding in their analysis and practice “other” women (Mirza 1997). Likewise, Amos and Parmar (1984) addressed three “critical areas” of feminist discourse: the family,
sexuality, and peace movements, where black women’s experience was seen to be very different from that of white women. They argue that white feminism lacked both critical
engagement with issues of imperialism and a challenge against racism in these three areas of critical concern. Western women valorized and prioritised their cultural experience, speaking as if it were global (Mirza 1997:10). This led Amos and Parmar to distance themselves from this brand of feminism and declare:
For us there is no choice. We cannot simply prioritize one aspect of our oppression to the exclusion of others, as the realities of our day to day lives make it imperative for us to consider the simultaneous nature of our
oppression and exploitation. Only a synthesis of class, race, gender, sexuality can lead us forward, as these form the matrix of Black women’s lives (Amos and Parmar 1984:18).
Mirza (1997:10-11) argues that white feminists were reluctant to relinquish the authority to name the social reality of the gendered subject, but black feminists continued to resist being
“named” by what they saw as an overarching imperial mission of white feminism. “They invoked their agency by challenging stereotypical images of black women as passive victims through studies and research, and writing that revealed the hidden world of migrant and black British women” (Mirza 1997:11).
Women’s agency that resisted “colonizing discourse” was also a crucial concern for women of the third world. As was discussed in the previous chapter, collaborative projects between white socialist feminists and scholars from the third world were initiated during the late 1980s around gender and development concerns. Undoubtedly, the ground for this collaboration must have been prepared as a result of the dialogue that was taking place between black and white feminists within Britain. The multi-cultural, postcolonial nature of black British feminism raised not only issues of race, but was also vocal in its resistance to being “colonized”. It was these linkages that increasingly forced feminists from the first world to reassess not only the way in which the absence of race and class from their analysis essentialized “women” throughout the world, but also the way in which their discourse contributed to the project of colonialism. It is to this debate that I now turn.