The Chicago Defender Summary

Brenda Eichelberger, president of NBFO, spoke of her experiences with African American and Women’s Studies classes saying: “I have been to several colleges, but none ever taught me that black women have a higher suicide rate than white women or that they have a higher mortality rate from breast cancer.”22 She feels that such a class would ideally be as interactive as possible, with a variety of guest speakers to attest to the powers of black women.23 Although The Chicago Defender doesn’t take a stance within the article, it publishing such a piece alone is telling. Between these three articles, The Chicago Defender takes a strong stance advocating for more black women to involve themselves in the Women’s Liberation Movement. They feel that
In their editorial to show that feminism means different things to different people, their inclusion of black feminism came across as obligatory tokenism. On top of that, it effectively made Eleanor Holmes Norton’s opinion serve as the sole voice for black feminism, assuming that her thoughts on the movement would suffice for an entire population. In their editorial on black feminism, Enid Nemy made some valid points about how some oppressions are universal, regardless of race. However, the rest of the piece focused on how black feminism was distinctly different from white feminism because black women already had some sense of liberation. If anything, black women have less liberation than white women, as they have been systematically oppressed for two of their identities for
Feminism in itself represented a strong sense of tension between the individual rights and societal claims. Women struggled to find the same respect that men did, both in the workplace and in society, and that’s a conflict which has continued into today. However, the rise of second wave feminism neglected to address the needs and concerns of women of color, sending multiracial feminism to the backburner. With black feminism specifically, white feminists claimed that the group already had liberation within their respective race, and that their need were different from that of white feminists. Hegemonic feminism served as the status quo, and major news outlets followed suit in how it reported on the topic. Between The New York Times and The Chicago Defender, it’s clear that what historians generally consider second wave feminism was simply hegemonic feminism, ignoring the needs of women of color in its movement. Black feminists were forced to create their own organizations and pioneer their own movements to find that sense of liberation that white feminists seemed to believe they already