Black feminism

The women’s suffrage movement

In the post-slavery era, the women’s suffrage movement, which aligned itself with prominent activists such as Frederick Douglass, began to gather strength. In 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who formulated the first concerted demand for women’s suffrage in the United States, openly opposed the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment—which prohibited states from denying the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—on the ground that “educated” women should be granted voting rights before formerly enslaved men. As a result of the controversy, the women’s suffrage organization known as the American Equal Rights Association fractured into two different groups: the National Woman Suffrage Association, led by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association. The latter embraced ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment alongside the fight for women’s voting rights.

During this era, several influential African American women writers and social reformers, such as Frances E.W. Harper, Mary Eliza Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, established the National Association of Colored Women, later known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC). Their effort was a response to the growing influence of the women’s club movement, which both Harper and Terrell critiqued as being indifferent to the racial discrimination and injustices experienced by women of color.

Black feminism and second-wave feminism

In the mid-20th century, Black women involved in the American civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the male-dominated Black Power movement frequently expressed feelings of alienation, detailing the blatant racism or sexism of prominent organizations, including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). At the same time, Black women struggled to have their concerns taken seriously within second-wave feminist organizations, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), which focused on advancing the interests of white middle-class women.

In response, Black feminists established activist groups such as the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which was formed at the New York offices of NOW in 1973, and the Combahee River Collective, established in Boston in 1974. The latter group is a foundational Black feminist organization created by a group of African American socialist lesbians who believed that the civil rights movement had failed to capture the complexity of their identities and the systems of oppression dominating Black women’s daily lives.

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During this era, the lesbian feminist Audre Lorde and the scholar and activist bell hooks were among several prolific contributors to Black feminist thought who argued for radical political and societal changes.

Third-wave feminism and intersectionality

The third wave of feminism, which began in the mid-1990s, is generally regarded as more inclusive of women of color than previous waves and is credited with bringing the notion of intersectionality to the forefront of mainstream feminist activism.

The term intersectionality was coined by the feminist legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics.” Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality maintains that the unique experiences and injustices faced by Black women cannot be understood along a single axis of oppression.