The Women Suffrage And The Civil Rights Movement

As we begin to study historical social movements that fought against a specific oppression or movements that fought for a sense of equality, we encounter with movements such as the Women Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. The Women Suffrage movement agenda was based on the idea of gender equality as well as fighting against gender oppression. The members of the Women Suffrage Movement consisted entirely of White, middle class women. The Civil Rights Movement goal was racial equality and fighting against discrimination and racism in society. The Civil Rights Movement members consisted of Black men. While these movements were successful in achieving their goals, they failed to fight for the people who are oppressed by more than
their gender or more than their race. Specifically, Black women, they were not included in the Women Suffrage Movement and faced racist treatment from the white women in the movement. Black women were also not involved in the Civil Right Movements because their main priority wasn’t just racial equality but gender as well. Black women struggled with having to deal with more than one identity and experience and choosing which identity and experience was worst. This intersection of multiple oppressions led Black women to form their own groups which are connected today with the Third Wave of Feminism These groups have shown how intersectionality became a significant concept in Black Feminist thought and how intersectionality has expanded throughout the years from social movements to academic uses. Our political system is constructed under multiple levels of systems of oppressions.
Our society has existed by giving and receiving different treatments to others based on the constructed binary groups you are in. Capitalism is our main political and economic system, we constantly engage ourselves with this system whether we notice it or not. Capitalism throughout the years has constructed these binary groups. It’s a system that created classism and heterosexism, it’s a system that could not exist without racism and unfortunately, it’s a system that created sexism. These are all systems of oppressions for the “other” groups such as the poor, the gays, the blacks and the
women’s. “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). A key to this liberation is Black women, who have experienced simultaneously race, gender and sex. Black women now have their narrative, the narrative that they didn’t have during the Women’s Suffrage Movement or the Civil Rights Movement. “The fact that racial politics and indeed racism are pervasive factors in our lives did not allow us, and still does not allow most Black women, to look more deeply into our own experiences and, from that sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). Intersectionality becomes a tool aspect within the Black women to resist domination. Intersectionality arose from the absence of Black women in feminist social movements, the idea that their identities such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation were simultaneously interacting and causing a social inequality in many events of their life. It’s not enough to just include Black women in social movements, the movements must acknowledge their unique intersectional experience and as Kimberle Crenshaw argued this includes the need to reevaluate and recast “the entire framework that has been translating the women’s experience” (Crenshaw,140) The Combahee River Collective is one movement that acknowledge Black women who were Lesbian. Intersectionality becomes more difficult to establish in academic settings, although though Black feminist have their own self defined standpoint, they still seem to be marginalized.
Black feminist standpoints are not being acknowledge in scholarly sources in comparison to a white feminist. An issue with this as Patricia H. Collins discussed is that “their tenuous status in academic institutions led them to adhere to Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies so that their work would be accepted as scholarly” (Collins, 228) Intersectionality in social movements has been more progressive than intersectionality in the academy. Black Feminist are agents of knowledge, knowledge that no other woman has which makes it unique. By having Black feminists adjust their experience to match that of a dominant group, Black feminist would become “two persons” just as they were during women suffrage movement and civil rights movement and that’s not what intersectionality for a Black Feminist is about.
Intersectionality for Black Feminist became a source of knowledge for those who have multiple and overlapping identities. Black feminist writings have increasingly become more visible to the public and their writings have a narrative structure, focusing on the idea of hybridity. Black feminist experiences can show many other oppressed groups the universe of domination that has existed in society and their institutions. Intersectionality works together with Black feminism to resist such dominations
and uses the knowledge of experience to liberate themselves from their oppression.