Women and racism

SIGNIFICANCE: As both an evaluation of human beings utilizing pseudoscientific criterion and a constructed system of social oppression, racism has been an external and an internal influence on the history of women and women’s issues.

Native American Women

At the beginning of the European colonization of North America, European men encountered quite different societies from Europe in the Americas. Women participated in most tribes as political leaders, religious leaders, warriors, agricultural and horticultural practitioners, and in other roles designated by European patriarchy as male. Many American Indigenous nations were matrilineal; for example, in the League of the Iroquois, final political decisions rested with female consent. Throughout North America, the many tribes differed in their degree of female authority, but comparison of American Indigenous society with European society as the basis of gender would designate American Indigenous culture as nonpatriarchal. It is most significant that Indigenous peoples included women in the center of religious and supernatural authority, unlike male-centered Christianity.

These contrasts produced immediate and sustained conflicts. Europeans, especially European men, observed American Indigenous women as “beasts of burden” and “slaves” to lazy men who, except for hunting and warring ventures, were indolent, nonproductive creatures. As Sara Evans points out in Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (1989), European missionaries were determined to convert heathens to Christianity, in the process establishing the primacy of the male deity and male supremacy in heaven or Christian earth, replacing female authority by patriarchy in all aspects of American Indigenous culture. American Indigenous people resisted this imposition fiercely but with limited success. In the late twentieth century, however, American Indigenous nations began reclaiming their traditional nonpatriarchy.

African American Women

The experience of African American women initially was framed and defined by the institution of slavery. The brutality and death inflicted on millions of Africans in the slave trade were exacerbated for African and then African American women by the sexual control and violence enacted by Europeans and White American slave owners. Many scholars have described the conditions of life for African American women in slavery as essentially no different from those for African American men, the punishments and sanctions exacted just as severe, along with the family responsibilities within the controls established by slave owners. Enslaved women were also subjected to intense, volatile, and negative attitudes and acts by White women in slave-owning families. Although clearly aware of the sexual violation by White male slave owners, these Southern White women were also distinctly privileged by their racial identity.

In the post-Emancipation nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, a dual location in the family/community and labor force produced two results. Jacqueline Jones demonstrates in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (1985) that the activities of African American women in the home and community centered on a positive locus of family feeling, a refuge from external White racism, whereas their presence in the labor market reinforced the subordinate racial and gender status in the United States. Again, as in the era of slavery, the racial and economic superiority of White females depended upon their control over African American women. Although it is clear that White men provided the economic resources for such economic leverage, it is also significant that racism precluded any effective bonding or formation of a biracial sisterhood. The image and stereotype of the domestic servant as an African American woman became common among women in both the South and the North.

Latinas

The history of racism and Latinos poses a similar but distinct experience. As Indigenous people, Latinas also experienced a comprehensive imposition of Spanish-European religion and culture; as with other European nations, racial consciousness (although not so labeled) dominated social classification. Incorporating a foreign religion with indigenous spirituality and coping with European patriarchy and racial stratification posed several dilemmas that were severely exacerbated by what some have called the invasion and theft of Mexican land by the United States in 1848. The subsequent dispossession of Mexican land, which affected all classes in remaining support systems, forced Mexican Latinos into agricultural work.

United States immigration policies, unofficial or official from the late nineteenth century, eventually encouraged Mexican women to join their spouses in the United States, with many becoming part of the domestic workforce in the Southwest. By the mid-twentieth century, they had expanded into other areas of the marketplace, but Latinas remained in the lowest economic strata and subject to essentially unchanged ethnic or racial discrimination. Puerto Rican women experienced the historical invasion of their island, severe population reduction (as suffered by most Indigenous peoples throughout the hemisphere), colonization by the United States, and, for many, subsequent migration to the mainland. The ethnic origins (African, Indigenous, and Spanish) of Puerto Rican people engendered a severe racism from Eurocentric or European-origin people on the mainland.

Asian American Women

Asian American women were a limited part of the nineteenth century Asian immigration, both by Chinese and Japanese design and by United States immigration policy. Although control broke down in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the racial antipathy remained. The Asian female experience was characterized by particularly intense oppression by White labor opposition, the patriarchy of Eurocentric American society, and “normal” racial antagonism. The racially based concentration camp internment of Japanese Americans by the United States government during World War II was a particularly onerous (and distinctive) event for this group, especially for Japanese American women. Ironically, this event was also one of the first comprehensive opportunities for Asian American women of Japanese origin to be outside of their traditional Japanese family context.

Racism and Feminism

The issue of racism within the women’s movement and as a component of feminist theory was and is quite problematic. Although the participation of White women in the abolitionist movement of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s was instrumental in developing a comprehensive perception and analysis of women’s rights, and then organized action on its behalf, the content and context of its meaning was exclusive of women of color. As Angela Davis describes in Women, Race, and Class (1981), the racism underlying the subsequent woman suffrage movement became evident in the outcome of the struggle for the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted Black male, not female, suffrage. The response by major leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony indicated their naïveté about White racism as a system of control; some critics have called their language vehemently racist.

This reaction characterizes the overall tendency of the women’s movement to define the universal struggle of women in Eurocentric, middle-class terms with both conscious and unself-conscious marginalization of women of color. White middle- and upper-class women often employed women of color as domestic servants, undermining the concept of sisterhood. In the context of White supremacist patriarchy, racial location (that is, being White) established the dominant societal authority of White women over non-White men and women. The acceptance of the European racial value system prevailed among White women.

Elizabeth Spelman, the author of Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (1985), is one of the few important feminist scholars to depict and analyze the marginalization of women of color, which had previously been ignored. Spelman’s indictment is particularly eloquent as it calls upon the work of feminists of color. As most feminists of color concluded quite early in the second wave of the women’s movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the centering of gender was not adequate to explain the influence of race and racism; that approach or perspective ignored the complicity by White women in sustaining racism. Bell Hooks insists that the “location” of women of color cannot be understood by a singular concept of gender; she is also quite emphatic that neither can the concept of race by a privileged explanation. Paula Giddings, the author of When and Where I Enter . . . : The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984), underscores the intersection of race and gender that separates the experience of women of color from that of both White women and men of color. Critical race theorist and civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw used the term intersectionality in her 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” to critique the marginalization of Black women both within the feminist movement, where they faced racism, and within the civil rights movement, where they faced sexism; she argues that the oppression faced by Black women is greater than the sum of the racism and sexism to which they are exposed. White feminist Nancie Caraway, in Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and Politics of American Feminism (1991), is very critical of the consistent exclusion by White feminist scholars of critiques by feminists of color.

Feminists of color describe a goal of political solidarity that would bridge the chasm in the women’s movement created by racism. It is a chasm initially constructed by European racism and White supremacy as imposed by male White supremacy. Hooks and Sleeter, however, further locate a strength of racism in the blindness of most White women and feminists to the rewards granted them through complicity in White racism, whether it is unconscious or not. They and others have concluded that feminism rooted in the singular presentation of gender in regard to women’s history and contemporary condition is quite problematic. The recognition of a matrix or intersection of race with gender is fundamental to a comprehensive feminism.

Bibliography

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Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, article 8, chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025

Feagin, Joe R. Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations. New York: Routledge, 2014. Print.

Hooper, Cindy. Conflict: African American Women and the New dilemma of Race and Gender Politics. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012. Print.

Levy, Peter B. The Civil Rights Movement in America: From Black Nationalism to the Women’s Political Council. Santa Barbara: Greenwood, 2015. Print

Muñoz‐Puig, Marina. "Intersectional Power Struggles in Feminist Movements: An Analysis of Resistance and Counter‐Resistance to Intersectionality." Gender, Work & Organization vol. 31, no. 3, 2024, 1133-47, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gwao.12995. Accessed 28 Jan. 2025. 

Ware, Vron. Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History. London: Verso, 2015. Print.