Words of Fire (46 page)

Economic exploitation, poor working conditions, inadequate health care, and anti-imperialist and antinuclear campaigns are just a few of the issues black women in New Zealand are addressing. At the same time they are challenging sexist attitudes and practices within their specific cultural groups.

Black women's organizing that is often specifically feminist has been going on in England since the mid-1970s. National black women's conferences, which include all women of color currently living in Great Britain, that is women born in England and women who have emigrated from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, and Africa, are held annually. A Black Women's Center, which works on a wide range of community concerns, was established several years ago in the black community of Brixton, and since that time, dozens of other black women's centers have opened all over London.

Black and Indian women in South Africa, who have always been central in the struggle against Apartheid, are beginning to address specifically women's issues such as rape, which is very widespread in the cities. In the future, Third World feminists in the United States and Third World women in other countries will no doubt make increasing contact with each other and continue to build a movement that is global in both its geographic range and political scope.

A number of black and Third World lesbian organizations are addressing a variety of issues as “out” lesbians, such as Salsa Soul Sisters in New York City and Sapphire Sapphos in Washington, D.C. They are doing education and challenging homophobia in their various communities as well as working on issues that affect lesbians, women, and people of color generally. The National Coalition of Black Gays (NCBG), which has had seven chapters in various cities and currently has several thousand members, has sponsored National Third World Lesbian and Gay conferences in Washington (1979) and Chicago (1981), attended by hundreds of participants.

NCBG was also successful in the struggle to include a lesbian speaker, Audre Lorde, in the rally at the 20th Anniversary March on Washington in 1983 and was instrumental in increasing the accountability of Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign toward lesbian and gay issues.

Black feminist cultural work is flourishing, particularly in literature and in music.
Azalea
, a literary magazine for Third World lesbians, began publishing in 1977. The Varied Voices of Black Women concert tour featuring musicians Gwen Avery, Linda Tillery, and Mary Watkins, and poet Pat Parker appeared in eight cities in the fall of 1978. Third World women bands, singers, poets, novelists, visual artists, actors, and playwrights are everywhere creating and redefining their art from a feminist perspective.

We have done much. We have much to do. Some of the most pressing work before us is to build our own autonomous institutions. It is absolutely crucial that we make our visions real in a permanent form so that we can be even more effective and reach many more people. I would like to see ongoing multi-issued political organizations, rape crisis centers, battered women's shelters, women's centers, periodicals, publishers, buying cooperatives, clinics, and artists' collectives started and run by women of color. The Third World Women's Archives and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in New York, both founded in 1981, are examples of institutions controlled by women of color. We need more. I believe that everything is possible. It must be understood that black feminist organizing has
never
been a threat to the viability of the black community, but instead has enhanced the quality of life and insured the survival of every man, woman, and child in the community.

In the 1980s, every one of us faces a great deal of danger. The reign of Reagan is more blatantly opposed to people's economic, civil, human, and land rights in this country and internationally than any U.S. government for the last fifty years. We are living in a world at war, but at the same
time we are also in a period of increasing politicization and conscious struggle.

If we are going to make it into the twenty-first century, it will take every last one of us pulling together. The unswerving commitment and activism of feminists of color, of home girls, are essential to making this planet truly fit for human habitation. And as Bernice Johnson Reagon explains: “We are not on the defensive.... 'Cause like it is, it is our world, and we are here to stay.”
¹⁴

1
This essay is excerpted from the introduction to
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology,
ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983).

2
The terms Third World women and women of color are used here to designate Native American, Asian American, Latina, and Afro-American women in the U.S. and the indigenous peoples of Third World countries wherever they may live. Both the terms Third World women and women of color apply to black American women. At times in the introduction black women are specifically designated as black or Afro-American and at other times the terms women of color and Third World women are used to refer to women of color as a whole.

3
Barbara Smith, “Notes for Yet Another Paper on Black Feminism, Or Will the Real Enemy Please Stand Up” in
Conditions: Five, The Black Women's Issue
, ed. Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith (Autumn 1979): 124.

4
W. E. B. Du Bois,
Darkmater, Voices from Within the Veil
(New York: AMS Press, 1969), 185.

5
June Jordan and Bernice Johnson Reagon. “Oughta Be a Woman,”
Good News
, Chicago: Flying Fish Records, 1981, Songtalk Publishing Co. Quoted by permission.

6
See Linda C. Powell's review of Michele Wallace's
Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman
(“Black Macho and Black Feminism”) in
Home Girls
and my review of bell hooks's (Gloria Watkins)
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism in New Women's Times Feminist Review
9 (November 1982): 10, 11, 18, 19 and 20, and in
Black Scholar
14 (January/February 1983): 38—45.

7
Quoted from
Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A
., ed. Jonathan Katz (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1976), 425. Also see Adrienne Rich's “The Problem with Lorraine Hansberry,” in “Lorraine Hansberry: Art of Thunder, Vision of Light,”
Freedomways
19, no. 4, (1979): 247-255 for more material about her woman-identification.

8
“The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in
Home Girls
, 272.

9
Linda Tillery, “Freedom Time,”
Linda Tillery,
Oakland: Olivia Records, 1977, Tuizer Music.

10
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in
Home Girls,
356.

11
Some useful articles on racism by white feminists are Elly Bulkin's “Racism and Writing: Some Implications for White Lesbian Critics.”
Sinister Wisdom
13 (Spring 1980): 3-22; Minnie Bruce Pratt's “Rebellion,”
Feminary
11, nous. 1 and 2, (1980): 6-20; and Adrienne Rich's “Disloyal to Civilization: Feminism, Racism, Gynephobia” in On Lies, Secrets and
Silence: Selected Prose 1966
—
1978
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 275—310.

12
Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(Urbana: University of Illinois, 1978), 29.

13
Between Ourselves
:
Women of Color Newspaper
, vol. 1, no. 1, was published in February 1985, P. O. Box 1939, Washington, D.C. 20038.

14
Reagon, “Coalition Politics,” 368.

b
ell hooks, born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, is the most prolific, most anthologized black feminist theorist and cultural critic on the contemporary scene. Author of eleven books, her first was a groundbreaking but controversial text,
Ain't
I
a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(1981). The major strengths of the text were its delineation of the impact of sexism on black women, both historically and contemporaneously; its discussion of the persistent racism of the first-wave and second-wave women's movements ; and its discussion of the involvement of black women in struggles to achieve equality for women, even when they were discouraged from doing so by various segments of the white and black communities. Its major contribution was her revisionist approach to African American history, in which she advanced the thesis that slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal
and
racist social order, not only oppressed black men, but defeminized slave women. She is presently Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York (CUNY).

The essay “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory” from her second book,
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
(1984), is a provocative critique of white feminist theory. hooks has helped to articulate the importance of feminism to a broad cross-section of the black community because of the accessibility of her writings and her attention to issues of paramount concern to African American women and men. Her most recent books are
Teaching to Transgress
(1994),
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
(1994), and
Art on My Mind: Visual Politics
(1995).

F
eminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually—women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement—it was written as if these women did not exist. Friedan's famous phrase, “the problem that has no name,” often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: “We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.' ” That “more” she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all nonwhite women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure-class housewife.

She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were
college-educated, white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home. She contends:

Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure-class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc. When Friedan wrote
The Feminine Mystique,
more than one-third of all women were in the work force. Although many women longed to be housewives, only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique. They were women who, in Friedan's words, were “told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudices.”

From her early writing, it appears that Friedan never wondered whether or not the plight of college-educated, white housewives was an adequate reference point by which to gauge the impact of sexism or sexist oppression on the lives of women in American society. Nor did she move beyond her own life experience to acquire an expanded perspective on the lives of women in the United States. I say this not to discredit her work. It remains a useful discussion of the impact of sexist discrimination on a select group of women. Examined from a different perspective, it can also be seen as a case study of narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and self-indulgence, which reaches its peak when Friedan, in a chapter titled “Progressive Dehumanization,” makes a comparison between the psychological effects of isolation on white housewives and the impact of confinement on the self-concept of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps.

Friedan was a principal shaper of contemporary feminist thought. Significantly, the one-dimensional perspective on women's reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement. Like Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on women's reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor are they aware of the extent to which their perspectives reflect race and class biases, although there has been a greater awareness of biases
in recent years. Racism abounds in the writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across ethnic and racial boundaries. Past feminist refusal to draw attention to and attack racial hierarchies suppressed the link between race and class. Yet class structure in American society has been shaped by the racial politic of white supremacy; it is only by analyzing racism and its function in capitalist society that a thorough understanding of class relationships can emerge. Class struggle is inextricably bound to the struggle to end racism. Urging women to explore the full implication of class in an early essay, “The Last Straw,” Rita Mae Brown explained: