Theory Of Intersectionality Analysis

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In 1990, feminist and sociologist Patricia Hill Collins developed her theory of intersectionality. Intersection theory proposes that the effects of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation, among other characteristics, can not be separated in order to be fully understood (OpenStax College 239). African-American women especially have had difficulty in addressing the social problems they faced, having been left disenfranchised or outright excluded from both a patriarchal civil rights movement and overlooked by mainstream feminist movements. While the black feminist movement, and later womanism, gained traction in the second half of the twentieth century and continues to this day, issues related to intersectionality have been a key issue for …show more content…

The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 had been the first women's rights convention in history. Notable suffragettes of the Gilded Age included Alice Stone Blackwell, Frances Willard, and Alva Belmont. The women's suffrage movement had been primarily abolitionist before and after the Civil War, however the feeling was not mutual for abolitionist leaders, having rejected their initial joint support, fearing that the suffragist movement was hurting their cause in the public eye. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868, granting freed men their suffrage, and ironically being the first gender-specific description of voting rights in the …show more content…

In an 1890 interview with The Voice, Frances Willard vocalized concern over the value of black voters, asserting stereotypes about black men as being drunken rapists, and therefore a threat to white womanhood. In the interview, she claims not only that "the colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt." but "the grog shop is its center of power. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment so that [white] men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree" Because of Willard's statements, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), of which she was the president of, has been frequently dismissed by historians as racist. In spite of Willard and historians, the organization was placed in a position of importance by many black women of the time, viewed as one of the best institutions to establish interracial cooperation (Gilmore