Summary Of The Combahee River Collective Statement

In the late twentieth century, organization around identity groups seemed to be at the forefront of social change, specifically looking at the women’s movement there were many new analytical theory that came about in this time. However, it is necessary to complicate our ideas of the women’s movement of the time in order to look at how identity can limit and expand our analysis of structures of oppression. By looking at the Red Stockings Manifesto (published in 1969), and The Combahee River Collective Statement (published in 1977), we can look at the ways in which the ‘radical women’s movement’ and the ‘multicultural’ women’s movement developed their analysis. By using Kimberle Crenshaw’s working definition of intersectionality to look at these

By identifying male supremacy, and by extension men, as the main “agents of oppression” they saw all other forms of oppression progressing from the genesis of male domination at every level. Thus their analysis of gender was not only stating that male supremacy was the oldest power structure but that it created all other power structures be it political, economic or cultural institutions. With this in mind, their theorization adapted Marx in a way that made female a separate and subsequently oppressed class, but they sought to empower this oppressed class in order to develop a female class consciousness. Their analysis still included the feminist notion that the personal is political but used this primarily in their strategizing. To illustrate, even though they stated that conflicts between individuals should be solved collectively and suggested conscious raising as way to do this; they still repeated focused on men being the problem and affirmed that “We do not need to change ourselves, but to change men.” This largely stems from their experience, as being subjugated simply as women, but furthermore being fed what they might conceive as a victim narrative from the larger women’s movement at the time. Thus, their more radical analysis and course of action sought to push

Because their politic started with an anti-racist and anti-sexist lens they expanded their understanding of the personal is political in order to value the most undervalued people in these current systems. The way they theorized the personal as political came from a realization that “the cultural and experiential nature of [their] oppression” has to be conceptualized in a way that not only focuses their experiences but one that doesn’t rely on the biological or ontological argument in order to build their politics. Therefore, by necessity they had to explicitly value black women and their experiences; They did so by building their politic around love and collective action. Their experience as being largely disregarded by both the black liberation movement and the women’s movement, either because of gender or race respectively, they felt they needed to create a new inclusive politic, a politic that could identify with the struggles of third world, women, and working class people. Namely, their strategies focused on conscious raising and collective analysis that