The Black Civil Rights Movement In The Mid-1960s

In the mid-1960s, discussions regarding the role of women in the mostly Black Civil Rights movement and the mostly white New Left began in earnest. The timing of black feminist organizations is therefore roughly equivalent to the timing of white feminist activism; however, it was widely believed that black feminists joined the feminist movement after the rising number of white, middle-class women unwilling to continue being submissive to the patriarchy. The myth of black women’s hostility to the women’s movement can then be attributed to the fact that black women did not join white feminist organizations in large numbers, because they formed their own in their own social sphere. Developing their own organization was quintessential to the

BWLG achieved recognition in large parts of the white feminist community due to the position paper, “Statement on Birth Control,” which argued BWLG’s stance that “the pill and other types of birth control were necessary for poor Black women to resist white domination, and that those in the Black movement who argued that using birth control was genocidal were class-biased and lacked an understanding of Black women’s lives.” Similarly, TWWA members began distributing position papers about the necessity of Black women’s liberation, arguing for the revolutionary potential of Black women’s liberation and the need for black women’s access to abortion. However, these position papers by both organizations were badly neglected by scholars studying second-wave feminist theory as evident by the past treatment of Toni Cade Bambara’s 1970 collection of black activist women’s

These organizations further fueled a veritable explosion of writing by women of color including: The Black Woman: An Anthology, The Warrior Woman, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and Home Girls. Although these organizations and books provide for a solid understanding of the history of black women, it is difficult to reconstruct such history because of black women’s need to juggle gender alliances and race loyalty while simultaneously carving out a separate compounded identity for themselves. Black women are thus distinctive among other women color groups in that they formed feminists groups in a political climate where they were forced to choose between fighting racism or sexism; if a woman chose to define herself as a feminist, she chose a political label that was not encourage by many male, and many female, activists in her