Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface.

        -Audre Lorde
      Sister Outsider, 1984

It is a lie to say that feminism is white, middle, and Western. As long as there has been a patriarchy, there have been women resisting it.

-Robin Morgan, keynote address, Association of Women in Psychology Conference, March 1993

The different reactions of Molly and Tandra to Carol Moseley Braun's successful bid for the Democratic candidacy are not surprising, in light of the separate histories of African and European women in this country. As we saw earlier, Black women became suspicious of White women's political motives during the nineteenth century, when, first, they were banned from White women's social reform meetings, and, later, their vote was nearly sacrificed by White female suffragists. These suspicions were rekindled in the sixties, when White women appeared to coat-tail on the issues of Black civil rights, causing that movement, in the eyes of many, to suddenly lose its momentum. It is this recent historical legacy that we now examine to explain why African American women like Tandra maintain a cautious stance in their political relations with White women today.

The Civil Rights Movement

While African American men and women have been fighting for their basic liberties since the day they arrived in this country, the modern Civil Rights Movement is said to have begun on December 1, 1955. On that day in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus for a White male passenger who had just boarded. Parks was hardly the first Black person to resist conforming to the Jim Crow laws of the South, but her arrest gave the local NAACP the perfect test case to bring charges of race discrimination against the Montgomery bus system.

Another Black woman important early on in the Civil Rights Movement was Ella Baker. In 1957, at the age of fifty-two, she helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), becoming its first full time executive secretary. Following the court ruling that struck down segregation in public transportation, the momentum of activism associated with the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery was about to come to an abrupt halt. Baker believed that a new group, other than the NAACP, was needed to keep things going in the South. She had in mind an organization that would specifically recruit church leaders and train them in the use of nonviolent protest as a means to win Southern Blacks their basic civil rights. Baker worked hard to make it happen. Thus, while Martin Luther King, Jr., was recognized as the official head of the SCLC, by all accounts it was "Miss Baker," as she was respectfully called, who helped get the SCLC up and running.

College campuses, too, became the site of much political activity during the late fifties and early sixties. Inspired by Rosa Parks, four male students from North Carolina's all-Black Agricultural and Technical State University, in Greensboro, challenged Jim Crow restaurant laws by walking into a Woolworth store on February 1, 1960, to order Coca-Cola at the all-White lunch counter. Although they were immediately arrested, their actions launched the student sit-in movement. Within a week, similar sit-ins took place in fifteen other Southern cities in five different states, and within eighteen months an estimated seventy thousand people had participated in them, and some thirty-six hundred arrests had been made.

Again, it was Ella Baker who first grasped the true significance of what was taking place. Within a few months of the Greensboro sit-in, Baker encouraged the students to organize, and persuaded the SCLC to contribute $800 for them to hold a conference. In April 1960 more than three hundred male and female students, Black and White, from fifty-six different colleges across the South and nineteen colleges in the North, convened at Shaw University to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Beyond organizing even more sit-ins, SNCC joined the SCLC in the campaign to register Southern Blacks to vote.

Young Black women were active in SNCC from the beginning. Diane Nash helped to organize the Freedom Rides that brought thousands of student volunteers on buses to rural areas of the South, and Ruby Doris Smith went on to become SNCC's executive secretary in its Atlanta office. Scattered throughout the South, young White women also became actively involved in the burgeoning student movement.

White women in the Civil Rights Movement experienced a revelation about the potential strength and toughness of women. Besides being exposed to such powerful Black women as Miss Baker and Rosa Parks, White women also became aware of the courage of the often uneducated, completely impoverished Black women living in the most remote areas of the rural South. When SNCC entered a new region, White women were surprised to learn that it was the women, not the men, who were contacted first. This was because there was usually at least one Black woman-referred to as the "mama"-who was willing to catch hell for her beliefs. She, more than anyone else, could cajole the others in her community into taking whatever risks were necessary to register to vote. For White women groomed in a tradition of passivity and sweetness, the mamas, as well as the other Black female SNCC staff members, made quite an impression. As the White student activist Dorothy Dawson Burlage recalled, "For the first time I had role models I could really respect."

Throughout the early sixties, a virtual flood of White and Black student volunteers headed south to participate in the the registration drives there. They boarded buses that traveled from campus to campus during the early summer to take them to the rural areas where they were needed most. In fact, so many students from Northern campuses went south during the summer of 1964 that it came to be known as Freedom Summer. Before 1964, SNCC policy prohibited White women from being on the front lines of voter registration drives, because their presence in rural areas was known to spark racial violence. However, in the summer of 1964, that policy was changed. Black SNCC staff leaders realized that the sight of White women helping Southern Blacks made good press. Ultimately, it helped to draw much needed national media attention. While the plan worked, it also caused a rift between White and Black women working in SNCC offices. It bothered Black female staff members, especially those who had risked their lives and been thrown in jail for their beliefs, to see the national media suddenly focus on White female volunteers who were there for the summer.

Sending White women into the field that Freedom Summer produced another unintended effect that further eroded relations between the White and Black women in SNCC. A significant number of the White women volunteers, especially those from the North, found themselves attracted to the sexually explicit manner of some of the Black men with whom they were working. To those volunteers, having sex with a Black man seemed a good way to demonstrate their lack of racial pre'udice. The Black male students, too, responded favorably to the presence of friendly White women. Having sex with White women was yet another way to defy the White man's authority.

The breakdown of taboos against White women sleeping with Black men drove a wedge between veteran Black and White female SNCC staff members. Understandably, many of the Black women became enraged at the sig ' ht of Black men falling for young White female volunteers. Their rage however, got directed not at the Black men involved, but at the White women willing to sleep with them. Ultimately, all White women working in SNCC offices became suspect. As feminist historian Sara Evans noted in Personal Politics, "The rising anger of black women would soon become a powerful force within SNCC, creating a barrier that shared womanhood could not transcend."

The 1964 Freedom Summer was also a violent summer, and by its end, SNCC was left in a near state of disarray. Thousands of volunteers had been mobilized, hundreds had been arrested, a few had been killed, and permanent staff members were overworked and short-tempered. SNCC had grown bigger than anyone had dreamed it would, and the time had come to asseses the group's direction and focus. One issue that needed to be addressed was whether SNCC was going to embrace other issues of injustice, or continue devoting itself to the single goal of Black liberation. A conference to consider these and other matters was scheduled for autumn of 1964 in Waveland, Mississippi. Among those invited to attend were veteran White staff members Mary King and Casey Hayden.

King and Hayden had devoted several years to the cause of fighting racial injustice. Recent experiences within SNCC, however, had led them also to begin defining themselves politically as women. The two decided to prepare a paper on the position of women in SNCC for distribution at the Waveland conference; because of the paper's controversial topic, King and Hayden kept their names off it. They cited numerous examples of sexual discrimination, detailing how assumptions of male superiority were limiting women's leadership opportunities in SNCC, drawing an analogy between the treatment of Blacks by Whites and the treatment of women by men:

A year later, in November 1965, King and Hayden wrote another paper on women that came to be called the Manifesto.  In it, they further developed their ideas about the treatment of women in society, describing the existence of a caste system that kept women subordinate to men. Forty copies of the document were sent all over the country to women involved in political groups. This time, King and Hayden received a tremendously positive response from the mostly White women who read their paper. From their Black women friends, they heard very little.

By the mid-sixties, a rising spirit of Black nationalism and even separatism was transforming the once peaceful Civil Rights Movement into something far more radical and dangerous. Black Power was in, and the feminine values of passive, nonviolent forms of protest were being replaced by a more masculine style of demonstration that included knotted fists, angry verbal threats, and even physical violence. The few remaining White women in SNCC fled, some of them joining other radical White groups, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Even though many Black women were relieved to see White women abandon SNCC, they too were affected by the more macho style in the organization. Angela Davis claimed that when she was helping to organize a rally in San Diego in 1967, she was constantly told that, as a woman, her role was to inspire the men, not to lead them. A year later, in Los Angeles, Davis again found herself reprimanded for trying to take over SNCC. The women were always stuck with the most boring organizational work, she said, and instead of getting credit for what they had done, they were told by the men to keep quiet:

We understand that it is and has been traditional that the man is the head of the house. He is the leader of the house/nation because his knowledge of the world is broader, his awareness is greater, his understanding is fuller and his application of this information is wiser . . . Women cannot do the same things as men-they are made by nature to function differently.

At a Black Power Conference in 1967, an official statement was issued, opposing the use of any contraception, on the grounds that it was akin to genocide for Black women to control their fertility. Although Black Panther Regina Jennings recalls that some of the women in the organization resisted the edict, eventually they were overruled by the party's central committee, which made them feel that they were bringing "bourgeois" beliefs into the vanguard army. For the sake of Panther unity, the sisters yielded their position. Some politically minded Black women, alarmed by this turn of events, began to speak up about what they saw happening. In 1972, writer Barbara Sizemore observed that it looked as though Black women were to "become chattel once again, with good and loving masters, to be sure, but chattel nevertheless."

Radical White men were no more progressive in their attitudes toward women. In 1968, when a group of radical White students from the SDS took over the administrative building at Columbia University, the women found themselves stuck with all the cooking responsibilities. When they rebelled, Mark Rudd, the most prominent student leader in the Columbia takeover, arrogantly told his girlfriend that she should go to "chicklib" classes while he was busy doing more important things. The following year, as a White SDS woman was speaking at a protest on the day of Richard Nixon's inauguration, a White SDS male cried out, "Take her off the stage and fuck her!" Incidents like these radicalized many White women, turning them into instant feminists.

The Women's Movement

As the decade of the seventies turned, the women's movement gained momentum. Beside the distribution of King and Hayden's Manifesto, several events had taken place to spur the movement on. The first was the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. When the bill was first being debated in Congress, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia, who opposed it, proposed that Title VII, which governs issues of employment discrimination, be amended by adding sex as a protected category along with race, color, religious preference. He believed the inclusion of sex as a protected category in the workplace would effectively kill the bill. His plan backfired. Representative Martha Griffith of Michigan, who intended for more legitimate reasons to add sex to Title VII, was able to marshal enough support from other politicians, some of whom were outraged at Smith's sexist tactics, to get the bill passed with the sex provision intact. But Howard Edelsberg, who was appointed founding director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was to be the enforcement arm of Title VII, made it clear from the outset that he opposed the sex provision. He intended to ignore all complaints of sex discrimination complaints brought before the new agency.

In large part, it was Edelsberg's arrogant attitude that led to the development of another organization that boosted this country's second wave of feminism-the founding in 1966 of the National Organization for Women (NOW). As originally conceived, NOW was to be a sort of NAACP for women, ensuring that women's civil rights, most specifically Title VII protections in the workplace, would be safeguarded. NOW's founding president was Betty Friedan.

Betty Friedan was already important to the burgeoning women's movement because of the enormous success of her 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, which put forth the radical thesis that the unfulfilling role of housewife lowered women's self-esteem, even driving some a bit crazy-as Friedan termed it, the "sickness without a name." To fix the problem, she demanded women's full and equal participation in the workplace. Friedan, who herself was White and upper middle class, wrote the book from her own perspective, and no doubt intended to speak to other women similarly situated. However, The Feminine Mystique made such sweeping generalizations about women that it ended up alienating and angering those who did not fit her particular profile. Her statement "I never knew a woman, when I was growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the world, and loved, and had children," struck a raw nerve among poor, working-class Black mothers who had been doing nothing but those things all their lives. To them, the idea that a housewife was oppressed was laughable. In fact, many Black women were fighting for the exact opposite of what Friedan called for. They longed for a time when their economically oppressed husbands could make enough money for them to stay at home with their children. Yet, as Michele Wallace notes in her book Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, in wanting to be racially liberated as Blacks, and yet taken care of like Victorian models of womanhood, Black women's desires were inherently contradictory.

While The Feminine Mystique failed to resonate with Black women, it spoke volumes to hundreds of thousands of White women. Armed with Friedan's book and dog-eared copies of King and Hayden's Manifesto, middle-class White women all over the country formed and joined consciousness-raising (CR) groups throughout the seventies. As they talked, many of them emerged from their silence, isolation, and paralysis to share with others for the first time the private pain of their illegal abortions, the batterings they had received at the hands of boyfriends and husbands, and their thwarted career ambitions. One by one, White women came to the realization that the "personal is political," and that yes, they too were victims of systematic discrimination. They also started saying such things as "women are the niggers of the world" and "woman as slave" to help explain their oppression to others. In so doing, White women assumed that they were establishing a link with Black women and their historical experiences. They could not have been more wrong. The "woman as slave" analogy in particular enraged Black women.

CR groups struck many Black women as frivolous and, at some level, insulting. The very idea that you could have reached adulthood without knowing that you were oppressed did not ring true with the experiences of Black women. No matter what your socioeconomic status-or sex, for that matter-you had some history of discrimination and oppression. Because so many Black women were still dealing with issues of "survival," rather than higher issues of "fulfillment," they came to ridicule middle-class White women's enthusiasm for CR groups. But what Black women didn't realize is that White women needed CR groups because White culture fosters a
greater spirit of antagonism. and competition among its women than does Black culture. In addition, many Black women already had in place a social mechanism that fostered the kind of sisterhood White women were now finding for themselves. That mechanism was the beauty parlor.

While White sisterhood may have been celebrated in the play and film Steel Magnolias, trips to the beauty parlor for most White women are primarily functional. Most of their time is spent in isolation under noisy hair dryers: the point for many is to get in and out as fast as possible. In contrast, when African American women go to the beauty parlor-and this was especially true when so many more were "hot combing"-there is a lot of time to share problems with others. In an article for Z Magazine, bell hooks described the beauty parlor experience this way:

But White women "did." In 1968, they organized a protest against the all-White Miss America pageant. Signs that greeted passersby were scrawled with "Welcome to the Miss American Cattle Auction" and "Miss America Is Alive and Angry-in Harlem," referring to the fact that no Black women had as yet participated in the national contest. Inspired by the draft-card burning by Vietnam protestors, the female demonstrators designated a "Freedom Trashcan" into which they tossed copies of Playboy and Vogue, along with girdles, false eyelashes, and possibly bras, for burning. (Although there is some dispute about whether or not any bras were actually among the items thrown into the Freedom Trashcan, this is where the derogatory term "bra burners," used to describe feminists, originated.) Some of the protestors bought tickets for the pageant; during the crowning ceremonies, they unfurled a huge banner that unmistakably read WOMEN'S LIBERATION for millions of TV viewers at home. They were immediately arrested, and the Black civil rights lawyer Flo Kennedy was called to help bail them out.

Flo Kennedy was among only a handful of Black women who were members of NOW. While NOW's leadership viewed itself as extremely sympathetic to issues of race, and welcomed any and all Black women as members, the organization could not seem to shake its image of being comprised of spoiled middle-class White women. Most Black women were turned off by it. It was even rumored that Betty Friedan had a Black maid present at one of the meetings in her New York apartment. Some Black women also resented that the rise of the women's movement coincided with the decline of the Civil Rights Movement, and they blamed feminists for stealing their thunder. Finally, some Black women rejected NOW because whenever they made derogatory comments about White women and their "silly" liberation movement, many Black men applauded them.

As the seventies opened, NOW began experiencing its own growing pains. Younger, more radical White women, some of whom were openly lesbian, were joining, and most of them believed Friedan to be hopelessly bourgeoise. Meanwhile, mainstream White women feared that lesbians were trying to take over the organization, and that a "I'm more radical than thou" mentality was developing in its ranks. Recalling her early experiences in the women's movement, feminist author Susan Brownmiller commented, "It was very difficult to survive. People used to say that the only person who can get up and say something and not be shouted down was a black lesbian single mother on welfare." Only four years after the founding of NOW, Betty Friedan stepped down as president. In March 1970, she was replaced by Aileen Hernandez, who identified as Black.

Relinquishing the presidency of NOW did not mean that Friedan was ready to give up control of the women's movement. Not long after she stepped down, she announced to the media, without telling anyone else beforehand, that a march for women's equality was going to be held in New York City to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of women's suffrage. Her announcement threw NOW members into a panic, as such events require huge amounts of time and energy to plan, and if they fail, the movement as a whole suffers. However, somehow things all came together, and on the evening of August 26, I970, an estimated twenty to fifty thousand women, Black and White, took over Fifty-seventh Street to walk in the biggest march for women's equality this country had ever witnessed. Participants included Gloria Steinem, who went on to found Ms. magazine in I972, Representative Bella Abzug from New York, Beulah Sanders of the National Welfare Rights Organization, Flo Kennedy, and Representative Shirley Chisholm, who claimed to have suffered more discrimination as a woman than she ever did as a Black. It looked as though a coalition of White and Black women had finally joined forces to support feminism.

Behind the scenes, however, racial tensions flared. A Black feminist group known as the Third World Women's Alliance (TWWA) wished to carry a sign reading "Hands Off Angela Davis." Earlier that year, Davis had been dropped from her teaching post at the University of California and, more recently, had been charged with first-degree murder, first-degree kidnaping, and conspiracy to commit both. Some guns that had been used to kidnap a judge, several jurors, and the district attorney during a trial for a Black prisoner had been registered in her name, and even though she was not present at the scene of the crime, Davis was "wanted" by the FBI. Members of TWWA were greatly concerned about Davis, especially in light of the recent violence directed at Black Panther members by government officials. Their political sympathy for Davis was not shared by the White women organizers of the anniversary march, though. As Frances Beal of the TWWA recalled, "One of the leaders of NOW ran up to us and said angrily, 'Angela Davis has nothing to do with the women's liberation.'" Beal shot back at her, "It has nothing to do with the kind of liberation you're talking about, but it has everything to do with the kind of liberation we're talking about."

There were other signs of racial divisiveness. The following year, award winning author Toni Morrison wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine in which she was highly critical of the "White women's" movement. Morrison stated, "The faces of those white women hovering behind that black girl at the Little Rock school in I957 does not soon leave the retina of the mind . . . It is a source of amusement even now to black women to listen to feminists talk of liberation while somebody's nice black grandmother shoulders the daily responsibility of childrearing and floor mopping."

At the same time, there were signs of support for feminism among a growing number of women in the Black community. In I971, the National Women's Political Caucus was formed to help get women elected and appointed to political office, and many women of color, including those who were conservative, found this group far more appealing than NOW. The following year, approximately thirty Black women from the New York area formed their own group, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), to "address the specific needs of the Black female who is forced to live in a society that is both racist and sexist." NBFO founding member Eleanor Holmes Norton confessed, "It took us some time to realize that we had nothing to fear from feminism." Within a year, NBFO's membership grew to over two thousand members in ten chapters. By 1974, however, the NBFO was in decline.

Activist Black women found themselves torn between loyalty to their own community and a growing desire to struggle for women's rights. Most ended up fighting a two-front war for equality. Audre Lorde neatly summed up their conflicting sentiments in a 1973 poem entitled "Who Said It Was Simple":

In 1979, former NOW president Hernandez concluded, in a minority task force report, that NOW had been silent for too long on issues of racial inequity. Her hopes for change faded, however, after the I979 annual election of officers at NOW's national convention. Although a Black candidate named Sharon Parker was running for secretary for the second year in a row, an all-White panel of officers was elected. For Hernandez, this was the
final straw. In a fit of anger, she accused NOW of being "too White and middle class," and called for the resignation of all its non-White members.

The fallout from this racial rift may have cost NOW, and the women's movement in general, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Instead of going after the support of Black and working-class women, who had the most to gain from ERA, NOW mostly sought the support of women who were White and middle class. When ERA did not receive the necessary number of state endorsements, some say the momentum of the women's movement died along with it.

Women's Studies and Feminist Scholarship

Feminist issues were kept alive in the conservative eighties on the college campus. CR groups evolved into women's studies, the first of which was a course offered in 1970 at SUNY-Buffalo, called "Women in Contemporary Society." The women's studies movement spread so fast that, by 1976, a student at San Francisco State University could earn a B.A. in the subject. Today over six hundred universities offer courses in women's studies. With the emergence of women's studies as a discipline, there came a virtual explosion of books and articles on feminist theory and gender analysis.

A White middle-class bias inevitably dominated much early women's studies scholarship, with the result that Black women once again felt excluded. One theory in particular angered Black feminists-the assertion that patriarchy, not racism, was the root of all oppression. As long as White feminist scholars believed that resisting patriarchy was a more legitimate goal than resisting racial oppression, the voices of women of color would not be heard, and they would not be attracted to women's studies.

Unfortunately, the voices of Black female scholars were often not heard at all. Throughout the seventies, their unique perspective fell between the cracks of African American studies classes, where much of the material focused on men's issues, and women's studies courses, where much of the material was devoted to White middle-class women's issues. This situation changed somewhat in 1982, with the publication of Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and. Barbara Smith's book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, the first Black women's studies book. But the gap was hardly filled. The reputation of women's studies faculty being insensitive to issues of race persisted. In fact, on the national level, accusations of racism at the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), the discipline's only professional organization, founded in 1976, were so bad that the group nearly dissolved in the late eighties. (NWSA has since regrouped, and appears to be better on track, with a more multicultural orientation.)

During the eighties, bell hooks emerged as the Black community's premier feminist scholar. In her debut 1981 book, Ain't I a Woman, hooks admonished White women for failing to consider race and class privilege in their original analysis of women's conditions. hooks was also critical of Black women who responded to racism in the women's movement by forming their own feminist groups. According to her, such a move would only endorse and perpetuate the very racism that Black feminists were trying to erase.

In hooks's second book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, she claimed that White women's demands for equality had a hidden racist agenda: it was really equality with White men, not Black men, that White women wanted. Were Black women, then, supposed to desire equality only with Black men? hooks also took to task White feminists for claiming to wish that more women of color would join the women's movement, and saying it was not the fault of Whites that more Black women had not done so. According to hooks, White women were acting like the hosts of a movement they did not own.

Another influential African American feminist scholar to gain recognition during the eighties was Audre Lorde, who admonished White feminists for their tendency to homogenize all women's experiences, thereby erasing the particularities of Black women's lives. In her 1984 book, Sister Outsider, Lorde wrote:

Despite recent attempts in the women's movement and women's studies curricula to become racially inclusive and multiculturally diverse, relatively few Black women publicly identify as feminists. A continuing reason appears to be the word itself In her 1983 book, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Alice Walker proposed that African American women might be more comfortable identifying themselves as womanists. Walker defined a womanist as one who is committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. By keeping men in the definition, she hoped that Black women would not reject the term as readily as they had feminist. Reactions to the new term have varied. While some women in the African American community, including Spelman College president Johnnetta Cole, embrace the word womanism, others, including bell hooks, reject it. For hooks, womanist lacks the tradition of radical politics that feminist has.

In reality, most women of both races do not label themselves either feminist or womanist. This does not mean, however, that women in general have not benefited from the many changes brought about by the women's movement. In fact, health care is probably the single area where feminist activism has most directly affected the average woman's life.

Health Care

Beginning in the seventies, feminists challenged the predominantly male medical profession, particularly gynecologists, obstetricians, and psychiatrists, for their insensitive and sometimes abusive treatment of female patients. Feminist health care activists helped women realize that they had to be more in charge of their own bodies and health. As a result, some women today, especially those living in urban areas, go to health care centers run exclusively by and for women.

The concerns of Black women and White women surrounding issues of
health can vary, though, and White female activists have not always been sensitive to those differences. One difference is in the childbirth experience. In recent years, middle-class White women have sought to demedicalize and naturalize giving birth. A growing number are turning to midwives to assist in their deliveries, and most are now choosing to breast feed, instead of formula feed, their newborns. Ironically, in the early twentieth century both of these practices, midwifery and breast feeding, were associated almost exclusively with poor Black women in this country.

Until as recently as the sixties, Black women in rural areas across the South were routinely denied access to good medical facilities, and were forced to rely on midwives to assist them. For them, health care dramatically improved when they were finally allowed to have their babies in hospitals. Most of them also had no choice but to breast feed; baby formula was too expensive. In both rural and urban areas, health care got better when government-sponsored health care programs, such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), made it possible for them to feed their babies with formula.

White women and Black women continue to hold vastly different attitudes toward breast feeding. White gynecological nurse practitioner Anne Zachman observed these differences after she moved from working with primarily poor Black women at an inner-city health clinic, in north Philadelphia, to a women's health care center serving predominantly professional White women, on Chicago's North Side. Zachman confessed that in Philadelphia she eventually gave up trying to convince Black women that it was better for them and their babies if they breast fed. It seemed to her that these women viewed breast feeding as inconvenient, vaguely primitive, and somewhat nasty and shameful. In contrast, the majority of White professionals that Zachman saw in Chicago believed that they should breast feed their newborns, and if they were wavering, Zachman said, "I could usually convince them to do it." While Zachman thinks that these attitudes toward breast feeding may reflect class as much as race differences between the two populations of women, she maintains that even among middle-class Black women there is a tendency to avoid the "stigma" of breast feeding, because the practice has so long been associated with Black women who were too poor to do otherwise. In fact, data from the 1988 National Maternal and Infant Health Survey indicate that only 27 percent of African American women breast feed their newborns, while 61 percent of White women do, and that these differences hold across socioeconomic status.

The most visible and controversial change in women's health care brought on by feminists has been the legalization of abortion. Before 1970, when New York and Hawaii became the first states to legalize abortion, well-to-do women with unwanted pregnancies flew to England or one of the Caribbean islands, where the procedure was legal, to take care of the problem." For poor women, this was not an option. In fact, statistics revealed that before abortion was made legal in New York city, 8o percent of the deaths caused by botched abortion attempts involved women who were either Black or Puerto Rican. Clearly the health of proportionately more Black women than White women stood to benefit by the legalization of abortion in this country. Why, then, have so few Black women been active in the abortion rights campaign?

To most prochoice middle-class White women, the abortion issue is about a constitutional right to privacy having to do with personal control over their bodies. The perception of abortion among many African American women has been affected by this country's shameful history of sterilization abuse. At the turn of the century, White social scientists and politicians claimed that Blacks, immigrants, and poor people were reproducing at a much faster rate than well-to-do Whites. To stop the perceived genocide of the human race (that is, of intelligent White people), many encouraged birth control as a "duty" for poor people not to reproduce so much. Only later did birth control take on the meaning of a "right" of women who wished to control their fertility.

The best-known crusader in the birth control movement was White social activist Margaret Sanger. While often hailed as a courageous feminist leader, she too was influenced by the ideology of her day. Sanger once stated that the chief goal with respect to birth control was "more children from the fit, less from the unfit."

The government gradually came to accept that one way to stop undesirable women from having children was to surgically remove their womb. The eugenics movement, as it was called, spread so fast that, by 1932, twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws, and the government provided federal assistance to states to help pay for the services. As recently as the sixties, mentally retarded women, or any women deemed unfit for motherhood, were at risk of the mutilating surgery. Predictably, statistics revealed that proportionately fewer White women than Black women were forced to undergo the procedure.

In 1973, while White feminists were celebrating the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, many Black women did not view the legalization of abortion as anything to feel good about. Even Black feminists who recognized the important health benefits for their community resulting from legalizing abortion ended up angry and frustrated at White feminists who repeatedly glossed over the matter of sterilization abuse in their public discussions of women's reproductive rights. Angela Davis believes that had White women been more sensitive to concerns about this abuse, more African American women would have joined in the fight to prevent the erosion of women's reproductive rights in the years that followed. And it's particularly unfortunate that this didn't happen, as poor Black women were hardest hit by the movement's setbacks.

In 1977, Congress passed the Hyde Amendment, prohibiting the use of any federal funds to pay for abortions. This meant that women on welfare, proportionately more of whom were Black, had to come up with their own money to pay for the procedure. Even today when such women arrive at hospitals and clinics for abortions, they may find themselves being persuaded into getting sterilized at the same time. While the federal government continues to find it morally unacceptable to pay for abortions for poor women, it is quite willing to foot the bill for poor women to undergo sterilization.

In addition to the Hyde Amendment, there have been other setbacks in women's abortion rights that seem to contain a hidden agenda. The predominantly White antichoice groups, such as Operation Rescue, seldom mount their protests at places that help poor Black women to terminate their pregnancies. As Davis sees it, "While women of color are urged at every turn to become permanently infertile, white women en'oying prosperous economic conditions are urged, by the same forces, to re produce themselves." Whatever the reasons, statistics compiled in 1990 by the Alan Guttmacher Institute indicate that in this country, Black women are more than twice as likely to have abortions as White women (5-4 per hundred Black women compared with 2.2 per hundred White women).

Of course, African American women as a group remain as much divided on the abortion issue as White women. On the prochoice side there have been such visible African American women as Faye Wattleton, who for years served as the national director of Planned Parenthood, and Byllye Avery, founder and director of the National Black Women's Health project (NBWHP). But unlike prochoice White women, who focus primarily on the safety and legality of the abortion procedure, prochoice African American
women view unwanted pregnancies as symptomatic of larger economic and social problems in the Black community. At NBWHP clinics, Black teenage girls with unwanted pregnancies can receive, if necessary, individualized instruction to help earn a GED and job-training skills to help them become self-sufficient.

Although more African American women today have become involved in the abortion rights movement, only about 5 percent of the estimated 300,000 marchers who attended the April 1989 Abortion Rights Rally in Washington were women of color. The majority of prochoice activists continue to be middle-class White women.

Prolife African American women also see the reasons for opposing abortion somewhat differently from prolife White women. Irene Esteves, national director of the Professional Women's Network, contends that White women are grossly insensitive to the tradition of extended family support within the African American community, which ensures that all babies will be taken care of Black Americans for Life spokesperson Akua Furlow believes that "Black women do not realize that the people forcing abortion on our people as a panacea to our social problems have a long history of beliefs in eugenics. They have a long history of racism." Nonetheless, a recent survey by the National Council of Negro Women reveals that 73 percent of minority women believe the decision to abort is one that women must make for themselves; only it percent believe that birth control and abortion are strategies by Whites to reduce the Black population.

Another area in which the women's movement resulted in change for the average woman is mental health care, particularly outpatient services. Traditionally, most psychotherapists were White men, and most of their patients were White women. African American women did not generally embrace the concept of having a paid professional sort out their emotional problems for them.

During the seventies and eighties, there was a huge influx of women into the field of mental health care. Many female clients began to prefer working with a female therapist. But White female psychotherapists who work with African American women are frequently disappointed to find that they cannot gain their clients' trust. African American women are often taught that it is a sign of weakness to put your "business on the street," especially when that street is outside the Black community. In contrast, White culture tends to encourage its women in disclosing information about themselves as a socially acceptable way to establish trust with new people, especially other women. This difference in communication can create tension and misunderstanding between White female therapists and Black female clients. And many African American female psychotherapists report that they must work harder with White female clients than with their Black clients to establish themselves as competent and credible.

Nonetheless, Black women are far less likely to consider and commit suicide as a "way out" than White women, even though disproportionately far more African American women endure poverty and violence. According to the U.S. Bureau of Census, White women are more than twice as likely to commit suicide than Black women. African American poet Kate Rushin captures the attitudes of Black women toward suicide in the following poem:

        IN ANSWER TO THE QUESTION
            HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED SUICIDE?

            Suicide?!?!
            Gurl, is you crazy?
            I'm scared I'm not gonna live long enough]
            As it is

            I'm scared to death of high places
            Fast cars
            Rare diseases
            Muggers
            Drugs
            Electricity
            And folks who work roots

            Now what would I look like
            Jumpin offa something
            I got everything to do
            And I ain't got time for that

            Let me tell you
            If you ever hear me
            Talkin about killin my frail self
            Come and get me
            Sit with me until that spell passes
            And if they ever
            Find me layin up somewhere
            Don't let them tell you it was suicide
            Cause it wasn't

            I'm scared of high places
            Fast moving trucks
            Electricity
            Drugs
            Folks who work roots
            And home-canned string beans

            Now with all I got
            To worry about
            What would I look like
            Killin myself

Despite a history of generally negative attitudes toward psychotherapy on the part of many African American women, there is some indication that such views are starting to change. A growing number now realize the benefits of talking honestly and openly about their anxieties. Violence, and the threat of violence, are taking their toll. According to one estimate, six out of every ten Black women in this country suffer from some type of major physical disorder related to their emotional well-being. As African American psychotherapist Julia Boyd succinctly puts it, "Our silence isn't golden; it's deadly."

Black women are also joining White women in exploring how low selfesteem affects them politically. In her 1992 book, Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, Gloria Steinem revealed for the first time her private struggles in learning to accept herself She turned around the popular feminist slogan of the seventies, "The personal is political," to say, "The political is personal." Boyd appears to have reached a similar conclusion in her 1993 book, In the Company of My Sisters: Black Women and Self-Esteem. She warns Black women that before they can get ahead, they must learn to love themselves, and she details how to do just that.
 

The Church

Traditionally, of course, Black women suffering from emotional stress and low self-esteem turned to the church for comfort. In recent years, even this staid institution has undergone political change.

During the sixties, some Black male theologians began identifying the ways in which Christianity was used to perpetuate racial inequality. They questioned why Black people were encouraged to worship the image of a White-looking God, pointing out that Jesus probably did not have blond hair and blue eyes, but was likely a dark-skinned man of some African descent. But when feminist theologians began raising analogous questions in relation to why God was male, and how the Bible was used to undermine women, they received little support. Black theologians and ministers may have been ready and willing to reject Paul's biblical command to slaves to be obedient to their masters as a valid justification of slavery, but they did not appear to question Paul's comments about women. Indeed, Black ministers, according to the Episcopal priest and lawyer Pauli Murray, seemed to fashion their own liberation theology after "super-male chauvinistic traditions."

Black women were slow to embrace feminist theology for many of the same reasons they failed to support other feminist notions: issues of race and racism were overlooked or ignored. A prime example of this tendency, and the distrust that resulted, can be seen in the work of Mary Daly, the most widely known of the radical feminist liberation theologians. She attacked the presence of male-dominated language and symbolism in the Bible in her classic 1973 book, Beyond God the Father, arguing that the problem could not be fixed by simply adding feminine pronouns to all references to God. Daly called for God to become a verb-"the Verb of verbs." She argued that only through such radical and dynamic transformation of the word God could women in the larger society break free of its masculine influence.

In her 1978 Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feininism, Daly further developed her ideas. Unfortunately, she returned to the tenet that racism was only a manifestation of patriarchy, the larger problem in society. Black feminist scholars were frustrated by the audacity of a White woman, who has herself never experienced the destructive effects of racism, deciding which problem was more central. Clearly, Daly meant to be racially inclusive. She specifically made a point of inviting Black women to participate with White women in returning to a goddess spirituality, to become a part of what she termed the Sisterhood/Be-Friending process. Yet the goddess images Daly included were all White, Western, and European. Audre Lorde responded in an "open letter" to Daly, stating, "What you excluded from Gyn/Ecology dismissed my heritage and the heritage of all other non-european women, and denied the real connections that exist between all of us."

African American women may have rejected some elements of White feminist criticisms of religion, but they have had their own complaints about the church. African American theologian Theresa Hoover has been quite outspoken about the fact that Black women give the most to the church and get the least back. As she puts it, without Black women's "stick-to-itiveness," most Black churches would have failed to keep their doors open or their preachers fed.

However, most African American women defend their high level of involvement in the church, claiming that Christianity has given them a heightened sense of community and connectedness that many White women lack. They also see Black women successfully moving into church leadership roles, pointing, as an example, to Barbara Harris, an African American who in 1988 became the first woman ever to be elected an Episcopal bishop. African American female pastors are starting to organize, too; they gathered for the first time in November 1993 to analyze their particular issues. One of the topics discussed at this history-making conference was the difference between Black and White women in the church. Audrey Bronson, who is pastor of Sanctuary Church, believes that Black women are more likely than White women to establish their own churches, because "White women will stay and fight the system, while Black women feel they don't have to take it."

Politics

The influences of the women's movement continue to be felt politically. In most states, women can now bring charges of sexual assault against abusive husbands and have ex-lovers arrested for stalking, and in some states lesbians can now legally adopt and get custody of their own children from a previous marriage. Every year, more women are elected to public office; they presumably better represent the needs of women, children, and the poor.

The women's movement has also made the workplace a friendlier place for women. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts was expanded and amended to protect women from being fired, or held back from promotions, because they were pregnant or refused to conform to sex-role stereotyping. It was also Title VII that served as the legal basis for women's right to work free of hostile and intimidating sexual harassment.

Unfortunately, there is an enormous gap between the ideals of the law and the realities of millions of working women in this country. Nowhere was this gap more apparent than in the 1991 accusations that Professor Anita Hill brought against judge Clarence Thomas. During Thomas's confirmation hearings for appointment to the Supreme Court, Hill claimed that Thomas harassed her while she was working at the EEOC, the agency charged with hearing such cases. While much has been said and written about the Hill-Thomas spectacle there is no question that these hearings revealed how differently White and Black women are apt to respond to issues where race and sex intersect.

Feminist White women rallied to Hill's defense, viewing the situation in terms that were strictly gender-based, while many African American women, even those who believed Hill, were convinced otherwise. Many believed that the charges saw the light of day only because Thomas and Hill were both African American. bell hooks, who has written extensively on the topic, maintains that had Hill been White, the establishment would have demanded respect for her privacy and blocked the spectacle from ever happening. African American economist and columnist Julianne Malveaux also believes that a major reason for many White women's enthusiastic support of Anita Hill was that she was "well-educated, soft-spoken, dignified, and aloof." Malveaux questions whether this level of support would have been extended to a poor working-class Black woman not as refined as Hill.

The Thomas-Hill case also marked a turning point for White and Black women's political relations in this country. Even if they didn't always agree with each other, the hearings did manage to get women of both races talking again about matters that particularly concern women. Here are just some of the many changes that have taken place as a direct or indirect result of Anita Hill's testimony. In its wake nearly a dozen political organizations and new groups were formed by African American women, including the Philadelphia-based Ain't I a Woman Network, and the nationally networked African American Women in Defense of Ourselves; (2) the number of women elected to the Senate has grown from two to seven, and twenty-four new female representatives joined twenty-three incumbents in the House of Representatives, raising the number of women in the House to an all-time 11 percent of the House; (3) the Supreme Court has become more liberal in its interpretation of Title VII protections for women, ruling in Harris v. Forklift Systems that women do not have to demonstrate severe psychological harm from sexual harassment but need prove only that the harassment interferes with their job performance; (4) accusations of sexual harassment at the 1991 Navy Tailhook Association Convention were taken seriously, and resulted in the dismissal of some to naval officers; (5) all branches of the military, including its academies, have been put on alert regarding the discriminatory treatment of women in the armed services Women of both races were rudely awakened to the truth that the fight for women's rights is far from over. In response, Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker and goddaughter of Gloria Steinem, established what she calls the Third Wave, a new political group for younger women of different races, classes, and ethnicities to carry on the fight for women's political rights.

Meanwhile, the women's movement continues to become more multicultural. At the 1990 national conference, NOW delegates, inspired perhaps by Alice Walker's novel Possessing the Secret of joy, unanimously passed a resolution pledging support and money to the Inter-African Committee working to bring an end to female genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East. NOW has also played an active role in the distribution of Warrior Marks, a film documentary on the subject. More African American women are moving into positions of leadership within NOW at both the local and national levels. In Chicago in 1988, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of NOW, Mary Morten became the first African American elected president of a major NOW chapter. And in 1993, Marcia Ann Gillespie was appointed the first African American editor in chief of Ms. magazine. As former editor of Essence, Gillespie has brought much-needed attention to issues concerning women of color.

At the same time, charges of racism continue be leveled periodically at NOW and other feminist organizations. Most recently, Efia Nwangaza, a Black South Carolina lawyer who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency of NOW, angrily claimed that White feminists still disregard their own role in the oppression of people of color. Some African American feminists also maintain that NOW was too slow in its defense of African American Lani Guinier when it became clear that her nomination for assistant U.S. attorney general was in trouble. They feel that had Guinier been White, NOW would have more vigorously and publicly supported her. On the other hand, few African American women came to the defense of White female candidates Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood when their nominations for attorney general faltered.

Despite such brushfires, the political relationship between White and Black women has much improved since the beginning of the modern women's movement in the 1960s. African American women activists are beginning to accept that it is not necessary for them to agree with White female activists to appreciate the new terrain they helped open up for all women. White feminists are finally starting to listen when African American feminists state that women's rights are not always going to be their top priority.

African American women will continue to play a pivotal role in politics, in part because they have the best chance of drawing the necessary support from both the African American and the liberal White communities. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the Women's Action Coalition, African American women are the fastest-growing group in American electoral politics today. In Congress, their numbers have increased from four to ten, and their voices, though small, can be heard in two major caucuses: the forty-eight-member Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues and the forty member Congressional Black Caucus. Because African American women stand at the crossroads of issues concerned with race and gender, in many ways they may be able to suggest new solutions to problems in society. It is African American women's turn, as well, to make a difference.

Within months of being put in office, Senator Carol Moseley Braun demonstrated her, potential to transform "politics as usual." In a move that angered many conservatives, but cheered liberal White and Black women alike, Braun effectively blocked the renewal application of a design patent for the insignia of the United Daughters of the Confederacy-which featured the flag of the Confederacy. She was the first person in the history of the Senate singlehandedly to turn around a vote on something that had previously been approved. While certainly the issue is symbolic, Braun's victory stands as a promise of far greater things to come for activist women everywhere.