The Second-Wave did Nothing Wrong

The Sixties, a time of change, of liberation, of freedom and opportunity for all women!!  Right??  Wrong.  Liberation and opportunity, sure, if you were a heteronormative, white middle-class married woman.  Life in general, and activism certainly were very different if you were a working-class black woman.  This was amplified even more so if you also didn’t conform to societal standards of sexuality.  These women not only had to grapple with the disadvantages thrown at them because of their gender, but also the combination of further disadvantages from being black and poor.  These extra issues were often breezed over, or entirely not understood and ignored by the white feminism that made up the second wave.  They could not simply get up and protest in every case like their white middle-class counterparts, because many of them worked in domestic service to support their families.  Activism would in many cases have put their livelihoods in jeopardy.  Many black families could not afford to lose the income of one parent, as wages were pitifully low for the kind of jobs they could likely be employed in.  This is not to say that poor black women did not get politically involved, they did.  Dorothy Height, Rosa Parks, Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer were just a few of the most influential names in women’s civil rights (1).

There was such a divide between the classes and races here that some black activist women claimed their own term, Womanism.  Alice Walker, a popular black author and activist, coined the term to encompass the minorities she felt weren’t represented by the current feminist movement.  Womanism was at its heart closer to what we would today perhaps call intersectional feminism.  It was about understanding the complex issues that white feminists failed to grasp, and discussing the problems that were most important to black women.  The issues were equal wages, job opportunities outside of domestic service, housing, segregation in schools and workplaces, and many others.  Fannie Lou Hamer, vice chairperson of the MFDP adopted ‘womanism’, as did many of her contemporaries.  Hamer was from a sharecropping family, and keenly knew the struggles that poor black families and their women had to suffer.  She spoke extensively in her work about humanism as well as Womanism and having compassion for your fellow human (2).  Interestingly, unlike many other movements of the era, women’s civil rights did not seem to confine itself to only caring about its own.  In an era of so much turmoil, women in civil rights understood that they were already at a major disadvantage.  This knowledge did not stop them fighting for their rights, and for the issues important to them.  

For all that second-wave feminism succeeded in, this is its great failure.  It is easy to judge the past by the morals of the present, and judging second-wave feminism by the morals of third-wave would be a mistake.  However, this was still a failure by the standards of the time.  No one movement can represent every group, and second-wave feminism certainly didn’t.  Civil rights itself was not perfect either, so dominated as it was by men.  So black women found what space they could somewhere in between. 

References:

1: Grant, Jacquelyn. Civil Rights for Women: A Source for doing Womanist Theology in Crawford, Vicki L. et al (ed), Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers & Torchbearers 1941 – 1965 (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1990)

2: https://www.biography.com/people/fannie-lou-hamer-205625