Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Into the first quarter of this century, organized labor’s approach to economic disadvantage held little promise for blacks or women, and thus no promise for black women. Samuel Gompers, the leading force of trade unionism and president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL, founded in 1886), believed that the best means of improving wages for Anglo males was to restrict the labor supply. His strategy was to advocate the return of women to the home and the banning of blacks and Asians from the unions. Although the AFL never formally adopted these restrictions at the national level, many local chapters did so through both formal rules and informal practices.46 Trade unionists cultivated a cultural image of the worker as a married male who required a family wage to support a wife and children. Labor actively supported protective labor legislation, which effectively excluded women from the jobs that would provide them with sufficient incomes to support themselves and their families. These efforts against women were coupled with the exclusion of blacks, other racial minorities, and, initially, southern and eastern European immigrant males from the most economically rewarding labor in the unionized crafts and the closed shops. Blacks, in particular, were specifically denied union membership or else relegated to the unskilled, low-paying jobs. Consequently, the denial of a family wage to black males exacerbated the circumstances of already economically distressed black families and individuals. In occupations where blacks were well represented, unionization often meant their forceable expulsion. Many of the race riots in the early 1900s were related to the tensions between black laborers and white laborers in competition for employment. So, an effective two-prong strategy for improving white men’s income required the demand for a family wage and the restriction of labor competition from women and racial minorities.

  In response to union discrimination, white women and black women and men organized. The Working Women’s Association, formed in 1868, was one of the earlier attempts at synthesizing feminist and white female workers’ concerns; the Women’s Trade Union League, established in 1903, allied white working- and middle-class women, while the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union publicized the conditions of white working women, demanded equal pay, demanded female representation in the national labor unions, formed female unions, and organized strikes.47 Ironically, most of the women’s trade union organizations as well as many socialist feminists supported protective legislation, but with the mistaken belief that involving the state would ensure safer work environments and reasonable labor requirements for both women and men. However, an unintended consequence of this strategy was that many women’s economic situations declined because protective legislation could be used to reinforce occupational segregation and thus limit women’s wage-earning opportunities.

  As the wives and daughters of men who did not earn a family wage, black women’s participation in the labor market was crucial to the survival of themselves and their families. Yet, black women benefited little from the unionization efforts among white women. First, they were disproportionately situated in those occupations least likely to be unionized, such as domestic and nonhousehold service and agricultural labor. In large industrial workplaces, they were segregated from white female workers, where the organizing took place, and were often pawns in the labor-management contests.48 Second, white trade unionists failed actively to recruit black females, and they often were denied membership because of their race. The protective legislation further hampered their opportunities by closing off numerous employment opportunities simply on the basis of sex. Black women wanted better-paying jobs, but they often had to settle for the jobs that were considered too hazardous, dirty, or immoral for white women, and for which they were not fairly compensated. During the Depression, race-gender discrimination was so pervasive that employment in federal work-relief projects often was closed to them. Thus, significant numbers of black women were unemployed and/or underemployed and, therefore, untouched by union activism.

  Despite their exclusion from the major unions, black women and men organized caucuses within predominantly white unions and formed their own unions, such as the Urban League’s Negro Workers Councils, African Blood Brotherhood, Negro American Labor Council, National Negro Labor Council, and Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called for a march on Washington in the 1940s to demand the end of wage and job discrimination, the desegregation of schools and public accommodations, protection of immigrant workers, cessation of lynching, and the unionization of black women. During the Depression, trade unions and unemployed councils held demonstrations demanding immediate cash relief and unemployment compensation, as well as advocating race solidarity. For blacks in the first half of this century, class and race interests were often inseparable. Black women benefited indirectly from black men’s labor activism, and they often supported those efforts by participating on picket lines, providing food and clothing for strikers and their families, and, most important, making financial contributions to the households from their own paid labor. Black women also engaged in labor organizing directly, both through existing predominantly white unions and through their own activism. Black domestics, tobacco workers, garment workers, and others organized strikes and fought for union representation.49

  The political Left, in general, supported black women and men and white working women during the Progressive Era. In fact, leading intellectuals, including Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and C. L. R. James saw socialism as the route for liberation. Two black women, Lucy Parsons and Claudia Jones, were among the early labor activists and Socialists of the Old Left.

  At the same time, women active in the New Left became increasingly frustrated with the theoretical and strategic indifference to the woman question. The sexual politics within the movement subjected women to traditional gender role assignments, sexual manipulation, male leadership and domination, plus a concentration on an essentially male issue, the draft.50 Once again, invisibility typifies the role of black women in New Left radical politics. Black women responded by incorporating class interests into their race and gender politics. In the founding documents of various black feminist organizations, scathing critiques of the political economy are a cornerstone of the analysis of domination. For example, the Combahee River Collective Statement pointedly declared that “the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as partriarchy.... We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”51 This excerpt clearly articulates an understanding of multiple jeopardy and its function in the dominant society and within liberation politics. Out of necessity, black women have addressed both narrow labor and broad economic concerns.

  Political theorist Manning Marable has argued that progressive forces must uproot racism and patriarchy in their quest for a socialist democracy through a dedication to equality.52 Yet a major limitation of both unionism and radical class politics is their monist formulations, wherein economics are exaggerated at the expense of understanding and confronting other oppressions such as racism and sexism. Despite the historical examples of black women and men and white women as union activists and socialists and the examples of the sporadic concern of organized labor and leftists with race and gender politics, class politics have not provided the solution to black women’s domination because they continue to privilege class issues within a white male framework. Given the inability of any single agenda to address the intricate complex of racism, sexism, and classism in black women’s lives, black women must develop a political ideology capable of interpreting and resisting that multiple jeopardy.

  MULTIPLE CONSCIOUSNESS IN BLACK FEMINIST IDEOLOGY

  Gloria Joseph and Jill Lewis have suggested that black women face a dilemma analogous to that of Siamese twins, each of whom
have distinct and incompatible interests.53 Black women cannot, they argue, be wholeheartedly committed and fully active in both the black liberation struggle and the women’s liberation movement, because of sexual and racial politics within each respectively. The authors recognize the demands of multiple jeopardy politics and the detrimental effect of neglecting these dual commitments. But what they fail to consider are the multiple and creative ways in which black women address their interdependent concerns of racism, sexism, and classism.

  Black women have been feminists since the early 1800s, but our exclusion from the white woman’s movement and its organizations has led many incorrectly to assume that we were not present in the (white) women’s movement because we were not interested in resisting sexism both within and without the black community. What appears recently to be a change in black women’s position, from studied indifference to disdain and curiosity to cautious affirmation of the women’s movement, may be due to structural changes in relationships between blacks and whites that have made black women “more sensitive to the obstacles of sexism and to the relevance of the women’s movement.”54 Black women’s apparent greater sensitivity to sexism may be merely the bolder, public articulation of black feminist concerns that have existed for well over a century. In other words, black women did not just become feminists in the 1970s. We did, however, grant more salience to those concerns and become more willing to organize primarily on that basis, creating the Combahee River Collective, the National Black Feminist Organization, and Sapphire Sapphos. Some black women chose to participate in predominantly white women’s movement activities and organizations, while others elected to develop the scholarship and curriculum that became the foundation of black women’s studies, while still others founded black feminist journals, presses, and political organizations.55

  Several studies have considered the relevance of black women’s diverse characteristics in understanding our political attitudes; these reports seem fairly inconsistent, if not contradictory.56 The various findings do suggest that the conditions that bring black women to feminist consciousness are specific to our social and historical experiences. For black women, the circumstances of lower socioeconomic life may encourage political, and particularly feminist, consciousness.57 This is in contrast to feminist as well as traditional political socialization literature that suggests that more liberal, that is, feminist, attitudes are associated with higher education attainment and class standing. Many of the conditions that middle-class, white feminists have found oppressive are perceived as privileges by black women, especially those with low incomes. For instance, the option not to work outside of the home is a luxury that historically has been denied most black women. The desire to struggle for this option can, in such a context, represent a feminist position, precisely because it constitutes an instance of greater liberty for certain women. It is also important to note, however, that the class differences among black women regarding our feminist consciousness are minimal. Black women’s particular history thus is an essential ingredient in shaping our feminist concerns.

  Certainly the multifaceted nature of black womanhood would meld diverse ideologies, from race liberation, class liberation, and women’s liberation. The basis of our feminist ideology is rooted in our reality. To the extent that the adherents of any one ideology insist on separatist organizational forms, assert the fundamental nature of any one oppression, and demand total cognitive, affective, and behavioral commitment, that ideology and its practitioners exclude black women and the realities of our lives.

  A black feminist ideology, first and foremost, thus declares the visibility of black women. It acknowledges the fact that two innate and inerasable traits, being both black and female, constitute our special status in American society. Second, black feminism asserts self-determination as essential. Black women are empowered with the right to interpret our reality and define our objectives. While drawing on a rich tradition of struggle as blacks and as women, we continually establish and reestablish our own priorities. As black women, we decide for ourselves the relative salience of any and all identities and oppressions, and how and the extent to which those features inform our politics. Third, a black feminist ideology fundamentally challenges the interstructure of the oppressions of racism, sexism, and classism both in the dominant society and within movements for liberation. It is in confrontation with multiple jeopardy that black women define and sustain a multiple consciousness essential for our liberation, of which feminist consciousness is an integral part.

  Finally, a black feminist ideology presumes an image of black women as powerful, independent subjects. By concentrating on our multiple oppressions, scholarly descriptions have confounded our ability to discover and appreciate the ways in which black women are not victims. Ideological and political choices cannot be assumed to be determined solely by the historical dynamics of racism, sexism, and classism in this society. Although the complexities and ambiguities that merge a consciousness of race, class, and gender oppressions make the emergence and praxis of a multivalent ideology problematical, they also make such a task more necessary if we are to work toward our liberation as blacks, as the economically exploited, and as women.

  ENDNOTES

  1 Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1973), 573.

  2 Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women,” Voice of the Negro 1, no. 7 (July 1904): 292.

  3 See Lerner, Black Women, especially 566-72; and Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 234-42.

  4 See Lerner, Black Women, 609—11.

  5 Elizabeth Cady Stanton as quoted by William Chafe, Women and Equality: Changing Patterns in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 44. Some eighty years after Stanton’s observation, Swedish social psychologist Gunnar Myrdal, in an appendix to his An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), also saw the woman problem as parallel to the Negro problem.

  6 Chafe, Women and Equality, 77.

  7 Helen Hacker, “Women as a Minority Group,” Social Forces 30 (1951): 60—69.

  8 For examples of feminist writings using the race-sex analogy or the master-slave model, see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York: Random House, 1974); Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon, 1969); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectics of Sex (New York: William Morrow, 1970); and Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973).

  9 See Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Vintage, 1980); Catharine Stimpson, “Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Thy Neighbor’s Servants: Women’s Liberation and Black Civil Rights,” in Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, ed. Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 452—79; and Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981). Recently, there has been some debate concerning precisely what lessons, if any, women learned from their participation in the abolitionist and Civil Rights movements. For an argument against the importance of race-oriented movements for feminist politics, see E. C. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).

  10 Other limitations have been noted by Linda La Rue, who contends that the analogy is an abstraction that falsely asserts a common oppression of blacks and women for rhetorical and propagandistic purposes (“The Black Movement and Women’s Liberation,” in Female Psychology: The Emerging Self, ed. Sue Cox [Chicago: Science Research Association, 1976). In Ain’t I a Woman (Boston: South End Press, 1981), bell hooks questions whether certain women, particularly those self-identified feminists who are white and middle class, are truly oppressed as opposed to being discriminated against. Simpson bluntly declares that the race-sex analogy is exploitative and racist.
See also Margaret A. Simons, “Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sisterhood,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 384—401, for a critical review of this conceptual approach in feminist theorizing.

  11 Chafe, Women and Equality, 76; Althea Smith and Abigail J. Stewart, “Approaches to Studying Racism and Sexism in Black Women’s Lives,” Journal of Social Issues 39 (1983): 1—15.

  12 hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 7.

  13 Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade (New York: New American Library, 1979), 90—100.

  14 See, e.g., Beverly Lindsay, “Minority Women in America: Black American, Native American, Chicana, and Asian American Women,” in The Study of Woman: Enlarging Perspectives of Social Reality, ed. Eloise C. Synder (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 318—63. She presents a paradigm wherein whiteness, maleness, and money are advantageous; a poor, black woman is triply disadvantaged. Lindsay argues that triple jeopardy, the interaction of sexism, racism, and economic oppression, is “the most realistic perspective for analyzing the position of black American women; and this perspective will serve as common linkage among the discussions of other minority women” (328).

  15 See Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Antheology (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), especially section 3; and Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” Black Scholar 13 (Summer 1982): 20—24, and Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).

  16 For other attempts at nonadditive models, see Smith and Stewart “Approaches to Studying Racism”; Elizabeth M. Almquist, “Untangling the Effects of Race and Sex: The Disadvantaged Status of Black Women,” Social Science Quarterly 56 (1975): 129—42; and Margaret L. Andersen, Thinking about Women: Sociological and Feminist Perspectives (New York: Macmillan, 1983). The term “ethnogender” is introduced in Vincent Jeffries and H. Edward Ransford, Social Stratification: A Multiple Hierachy Approach (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1980); and Edward Ransford and Jon Miller, “Race, Sex, and Feminist Outlook,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 46—59.