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CHICANA FEMINISM The Chicana Feminist movement evolved between 1970 to 1980. It addressed concerns of Chicana's due to the interplay of race, class, and gender oppression. The Chicana's struggled to gain equal status in the male dominated movement. Both liberal and radical feminists hope to achieve gender solidarity through the politics of identity. Poet Robin Morgan called the anthology of feminist essays she edited in 1970 Sisterhood Is Powerful. As women of color pointed out from the beginning of the movement, sisterhood was also complicated.
Many women of color felt excluded from a theory that elevated gender at the expense of race or class identity. By making white womens experience their standard, both liberal and radical feminists overlooked the perspectives of women of color. For example, when Betty Friedan called for liberating women from the home through employment, women of color who had always worked knew that joining the men of their race on the job meant they would still encounter discrimination. Or when the radical feminist theologian Mary Daly spoke about reclaiming womens spirituality through rituals honoring the goddess African American poet Are Lorde asked, What color is your goddess? A white female deity marched the white male deity, ignoring the heritage of African spirituality.
Separatist politics troubled other women of color. For many Chicana's, the extended family represented both economic and cultural survival. When a family is involved in a human rights movement, as is the Mexican-American family, Enrique ta Long eaux y Vasquez wrote in 1972, there is little room for a womans liberation movement alone. Other women of color echoed the pervasive homophobia of the society when they rejected feminism because of its inclusion of lesbians (Chicana Feminism). Despite these tensions, women of color in the United States clearly recognized that gender as well as race affected their lives.
A 1972 poll showed that two-thirds of black women, compared to only one-third of white women, were sympathetic to the womens movement. A 1976 survey of Chicana students found agreement with the goals of feminism as well as the view that the white womens movement was elitist and too focused on men as the oppressors. Many women of color longed for a more inclusive feminism. Former SNCC worker Elizabeth Martinez, for example, recalled that after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, she realized that if the struggle against sexism did not see itself as profoundly entwined with the fight against racism, I was gone. At the same time, though, she looked hard at the sexism in the Chicano movimiento, and knew a Chicana feminism needed to be born.
Women of color who shared feminist goals faced dual obstacles, from their own communities and from womens movements. Black nationalists, for example, urged women to align with racial rather than sexual politics, primarily by supporting men through womens roles as wives and mothers. Asian American feminists were criticized as traitors to their race for threatening ethnic identity, just as Chicana feminists risked being labeled vend idas, or sellouts, in the Chicano movement (Chicana Feminism). Yet when women of color did join the womens movement, they encountered overt and subtle racial bias. Given their small numbers, they often felt the discomfort of being treated as tokens, expected to represent their race but not to bring their own issues to the table. Inclusion without influence, Line Until called it, or as Bernice Johnson Reagan explained, You dont really want Black folks; you are just looking for yourself with a little color in it. (Donovan, Josephine).
The title of the collection of African American womens writing captured well the exclusion: All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us are Brave (1982). In response to this dilemma, women of color initiated a redefinition of identity politics. They refused the pressures from both men of color who would degrade womens issues and white women who would put down race issues. When the Chicano movement called on the women of La Raza (the race) to reject feminism, Adelaide del Castillo insisted that true freedom for our people can come about only if prefaced by the equality of individuals within La Raza. (Chicana Feminism). Just as women had separated from men within the New Left, women of color established their own groups. One of these, the Combahee River Collective, issued a black feminist statement in 1974 that pledged to struggle together with black men against racism, while we also struggle with black men about sexism.
Asian American Women United, Women of All Red Nations, and the National Black Womens Health Project served specific groups. Women from a variety of racial backgrounds formed Kitchen Table/ Women of Color Press to present diverse womens stories. In 1981 the published an influential anthology. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) edited by Chicana feminists Cherry Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, opened a cultural space for further explorations of multiple personal identities. (Chicana Feminism).
The intense conversations on identity and privilege encouraged some U. S. feminists to form coalitions across line of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. So did the political conversation of the 1980 s, which put the feminists on the defensive. Facing common opposition and learning to trust across difference, though never an easy task, helped sustain grassroots feminism in the face of opposition. WORK CITED Chicana Feminism.
Accessed 3 April 2006 at: web Donovan, Josephine. Feminist Theory. A Frederick Ungar book. Continuum.
New York,
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