CHAPTER 1

A Brief History of Feminist Movements

Throughout this chapter, we provide a foundation for our feminist cultural history from a different perspective than the one we might have learned in school or college. We will look at how women became divided early in the first wave of the feminist movement and throughout the subsequent second, third, and fourth waves. The term “waves” might connote a monolithic and unified agenda around one set of ideas where in fact it contains a variety of issues around different ideas at different times perpetuated by different women.¹ We examine how that division has kept us from gaining equity with men in substantial and sustainable ways, thus leading to sabotaging behaviors. Let’s be clear, we believe sabotage occurred long before feminism’s first wave, in extremely violent ways under slavery: women encouraging their husbands to beat female slaves or doing it themselves, forcing other women to work while ill, and turning a blind eye while plantation masters raped black women (think Mistress Epps and her treatment of Patsey in the movie 12 Years a Slave).² But we will begin with the movements in the 1800s.

First-Wave Feminism from 1800 to 1920

No, this isn’t an American History Ph.D. candidate’s dissertation. We need to establish background before we get into modern times. So let’s begin with a brief history, starting in the 1800s and going to the 1920s, during feminism’s important first wave. It helps to start by establishing who was doing what and when. If you recall your high school history class, the Seneca Falls Convention likely rings a bell. After Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were barred from the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 because women were not allowed to participate, they decided to organize. The Seneca Falls Convention in New York was held in July 1848, with 300 people in attendance, mostly women. Together, they debated and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, which its author Stanton modeled after the Declaration of Independence.

However, many of us may not know that, long before Seneca Falls, women activists of color were already working in their communities to not only abolish slavery but to also obtain the right to vote. Maria W. Stewart, a black teacher and journalist who was born of free parents but placed in servitude after their untimely death when she was five, was the first American woman to give a speech to a mixed gender audience. Between 1831 and 1832, she gave four speeches in Boston to organizations like the African-American Female Intelligence Society specifically about the plight of African American women.³ At the prompting of editor William Lloyd Garrison, she started writing for his abolitionist magazine The Liberator. Stewart was also the first black woman to lecture about women’s rights and make a public antislavery speech, in addition to Ida B. Wells and Sojourner Truth.⁴

The white women’s movement started gaining momentum before the start of the Civil War (1861–1865). We separate the two movements because white women created a rift along racial lines. They allowed Southern antiabolitionist women and other political factions to influence them, convincing them that the only way to get the vote was to sideline black men and women in order to appease a racist majority.⁵ The dialogue became that of the supposed inferiority of black people, and maintaining the presumed superior white race became a major part of their actions.

Passed in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act allowed slave owners from the South to recapture escaped slaves. The Civil War had not yet started, so it was even more urgent for black people to be freed and get the vote. They were facing escalated violence, as angry white Southerners began to lose their free (slave) labor. In that same year, the first National Women’s Rights Convention commenced. Stakes were higher for the collaboration between the women’s movement and the abolitionist movement. It was at these conventions that Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth all came together. At this time, William Lloyd Garrison and other men of the Republican Party were also speaking up for women’s rights and abolition.

In 1851, Sojourner Truth gave her famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, while she was working tirelessly on both the abolitionist and women’s movements. Other women such as Ida B. Wells, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Mary Church Terrell were all speaking, writing, and organizing for both women’s rights and abolition. The split occurred around 1866 after the Civil Rights Act passed, granting former slaves and women equal protection under the law but not the vote. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment gave voting rights to all men with equal protection under the law — but not women. The ratification of this amendment caused Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass to go their separate ways. Douglass was worried about the growing violence that former slaves and black people were facing from Southern backlash following the Civil War. Anthony and Stanton both asserted, on numerous occasions, that they would rather see white people gain the vote over former slaves and black people.

PROMINENT BLACK WOMEN IN THE MOVEMENT IN THE 1800S

Simultaneously during this time, black women were pushing for female and racial equity. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a prominent black speaker and suffragette, started the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869 with two white women, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. Twenty-three years later, in 1892, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Frances Harper, and Ruffin started the first National Association for Colored Women. The problem was that cultural perspectives didn’t shift even after the Civil War or the Fifteenth Amendment. White women were using women of color as domestic workers, thus furthering their privilege and desire to access cheap labor. By 1890, the census revealed that there were 2.7 million young black women and girls working at domestic jobs that weren’t much different from the slave conditions they thought they had escaped. Sexual assault was still prevalent in the white households in which they worked. In addition, black women working in agriculture were made to sign contracts that could be used against them if their employers decided they were owed more hours or money.

The last ten years of the nineteenth century proved to be dangerous for black people — living and working in America. Violence was at an all-time high and was becoming normalized through laws of segregation in the South, and persistent limited economic opportunities in the North. At the same time, white women were continually banding together to enable white supremacy to be more fully entrenched in the movement by not allowing women of color into their meetings, and taking on the agenda of Southern white women — whose racism was anything but implicit.

By 1896, the National League of Colored Women and the First National Conference of Colored Women emerged as organizations focusing specifically on women of color. Activist and educator Mary Church Terrell led the National League of Colored Women as the most influential woman in the organization. These organizations focused on strategizing against the inhumane conditions of domestic work, assaults on black women’s image, and anti-lynching laws. Simultaneously, white men were pressuring white women to support white interests over those of people of color so the white women could move closer to getting the vote. It was a very clear line in the sand — organizations founded and run by white women continued to ignore the plight of people of color, immigrants, refugees, and poor working-class whites.

THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT

Let’s fast-forward to 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was finally passed. Technically, this amendment gave all women the right to vote, though for a time it functionally only applied to white women. Black women were disenfranchised in the South, and other women of color were not extended this right through various racist structures that were in place. At this time, potential voters were required to pass literacy tests; this, and additional limitations in access to polls made voting difficult for black women. Every time one barrier was removed, another one came along to replace it. The goalpost kept moving, and the laws kept making it harder for people of color to vote. Native women couldn’t vote until 1924, Asian American women were barred until 1952, and black women were given the right to vote as late as 1964, so to say “women” got the right to vote in 1920 is limited, to say the least.

The Second Wave: Civil and Reproductive Rights

Feminism’s second wave was much informed by the civil rights movement that took place in 1950s and 1960s. What was called the women’s liberation movement would come into fruition and inform politics via such programs as the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and established by President Kennedy in 1961 to advise him on the status of women’s issues. Rather than ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, which would give women equal rights under the law, Kennedy thought the commission could satisfy his labor base, which believed that women needed their own protected legislation for workplace accommodations to avoid workplace injury and exploitation. The protected legislation just reinforced employers to only hire men so they could avoid making any special accommodations for women.⁷

After they were ousted from a political conference because they wanted to talk about women’s issues, Jo Freeman and Shulamith Firestone created the newsletter “Voice of the Women’s Liberation Movement” in 1967, which popularized the term “women’s liberation movement.” With the inception of the National Organization for Women (NOW), spearheaded by Betty Friedan (author of The Feminine Mystique), second-wave feminism prompted the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX, and Title VII. Title IX gives women equal access to college sports, and Title VII bans sexual harassment from the workplace. Unfortunately, the Equal Rights Amendment, as of 2018, has still not passed. However, we want to pay close attention to the voices of the women who have continually been marginalized in the feminist movement.

What we find in the second wave are sidelined voices shouting their needs to the players on the field. The players from the first wave were those who benefited primarily from the feminist movement: white women. The voices of those representing racial, ethnic, and sometimes even sexual heritages and opinions were relegated to the bench and the stands as this movement progressed. But before we dig into the second wave, let’s take another look at womanism. It was womanism that cleared the path for the other movements of this wave to flourish in ways that, as we will see in the subsequent waves of feminism, changed the understanding of what it means to address equity among women. This liberation of the wholeness of our womanhood is the foundation of the undergraduate pedagogy that has followed Kami especially for most of her adult life.

During this second wave, reproductive health was a major issue that privileged white women’s voices over women of color, along with equal pay for equal work, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and maternity leave. Systems like health care, education, politics, and human services, in addition to nonprofits and corporations, are most often set up with a top-down hierarchical structure. Women have not had an equal voice in the construction of these entities. Women of color fare far worse in the issues around reproductive and sexual health. Let’s take a look at how the first-wave women informed the second wave’s approach to reproductive rights.

In the first wave, a few exceptions set the stage for the reemergence of reproductive rights in the second wave. Sarah Grimke, writer and Quaker, was mostly active in abolition, but started to garner more speaking engagements on the subject of “voluntary motherhood.” In 1850, her book Marriage maintained that women ought to have the right to decide when and if they wanted children, and should have the right to refuse sex with their husbands.

She continued that both women and men should be educated about what is called “family planning” today. At the time, it was a revolutionary — and maligned — idea because women were encouraged to have as many children as possible. However, this fundamental right to decide if and when you wanted children also gave women space to participate in the political process and not be burdened with too many children, if they so desired. Although black women may have felt the same way, their priorities were different, and took the form of preserving their own lives and halting violence above other concerns. Shortly after the Thirteenth Amendment and onward, black women were more or less forcibly sterilized. This extends to today in prisons, both juvenile and adult. Forced sterilization happened among 43 percent of black women during the 1960s and 1970s.⁸ There is a long history of forced sterilization among Native, Asian American, and Mexican American men and women.⁹ The National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum has been informing policies and activism specifically for Asian American women.¹⁰

In 1916, Margaret Sanger, a birth control activist, writer, and nurse, opened the first birth control clinic in the mostly black-populated Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. She was arrested nine days later. However, even Sanger spoke prominently at eugenics conferences in which she spoke about weeding out the unfit through sterilization. Proponents of her work suggest that her statements were more about the desire to encourage people to have the children they wanted, and to promote high intelligence, cleanliness, and hard work — while disincentivizing those who did not embody these qualities to breed. This makes what could have been a progressive movement an inherently racist one, as well as paternalistic. It’s also worth mentioning that reproductive rights were supported by white women who wanted to work and participate in activities outside the home. For many working-class women — of color and otherwise — that was never an option as they had no choice but to work outside the home and manage life inside the home. When these reproductive programs were established, family planning was viewed as a “right” for white women to reduce their family size, and a “duty or moral obligation” to the poor, the working class, and women of color. Classism and racism would work themselves into the reproductive rights movement by dividing women along class lines, especially poor working-class whites, women of color, and immigrants. It was assumed that if working women didn’t have as many children, they would have ample resources to pull themselves out of poverty. Obviously, it’s not that simple.

Throughout her seminal 1981 book Women, Race and Class, Angela Davis outlined the first and second waves’ history with reproductive rights in great detail. Notably, she maintains that white feminists might have understood why addressing the abuses of sterilization was so important and might have solidified the movement more had they understood the ramifications to black women. This is our primary takeaway: to express why, as the movement progresses, we can’t continually repeat the same mistakes through power and privileged ignorance.

The Third Wave: Power Feminism and the Beauty Myth

Feminism’s third wave, which we can date from the 1990s to perhaps the early 2000s (although this is debated), saw women examining sexual harassment, rape culture, and body image. There are those who suggest we are still in the third wave and that this wave is indeed intersectional (more about this in the next section), but we would argue that because this wave lacked the power of technology and social media, it stands on its own.

There’s a specific movie that, even though came out in 1980, we feel helped usher in feminism’s third wave. 9 to 5 threw a radical, empowering curveball. Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin starred as three working white women who kidnap their misogynistic boss. In this same year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidelines under Title VII on prohibiting sexual harassment in the office. Anita Hill brought this to a head during the Clarence Thomas hearings eleven years later, in 1991.

The third wave’s focus on rape culture and sexual harassment took precedence in legal arenas, but the social arena focused on body image and women in the workplace. Popular culture and art started to change the narrative of the capabilities of women. There were more cultural references to women moving in power positions at work. Television showed powerful women as portrayed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Musicians like Missy Elliott, TLC, Destiny’s Child, and the Spice Girls were all “bossing it up.” However, these powerhouses were also being portrayed as lonely, unfulfilled, and slightly neurotic. Think Diane Keaton leaving her high-powered job to take care of a baby in a farmhouse in Baby Boom — she ended up creating her own line of baby food and rocking it — or Demi Moore sexually harassing her colleague Michael Douglas in Disclosure, basically doing what men do all the time (but she got caught), and the queen bee syndrome that shows up where these women made it to the top while playing a man’s game. They expect other women behind them to do the same. The queen bee syndrome especially is a clear case of sabotage.

Naomi Wolf wrote and spoke out against rape culture on college campuses, and Rebecca Walker wrote “Becoming the Third Wave” in Ms. magazine. Walker began her article by saying she couldn’t bear to watch the Anita Hill hearings — it was too reminiscent of the O. J. Simpson trial, too much about what Toni Morrison calls the “white gaze,” that constant, watchful eye white people level on people of color, and the blaming of black people for things that white people get away with all the time.

In her fierce call to action, Walker clarified the power of the third wave by asking for solidarity among women across differences. She declared that the unrelenting massive attacks on our bodies, our silence, our complicity, our acquiescence for what is baked into our socialization to accept from men, could not stand any longer.

The Fourth Wave: Intersectionality

The fourth wave is what some may term as intersectional. It includes queer, body, trans, and sex positive agendas and is mostly digitally driven. With the rise of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, women have been able to share their experiences, mobilize movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, and utilize many other hashtags that bring recognition to rape on college campuses and workplace harassment and violence. However, before we continue, we’d like to push back on the term “intersectional.” The term comes from examining the law and ethics through a critical race lens. Kimberlé Crenshaw coined this term after examining outright discrimination in police engagement, especially the criminal justice system and the overrepresentation of black women in the prison system.²¹ Crenshaw explains, “Because of their intersectional identity as both women and people of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, the interests and experiences of women of color are frequently marginalized within both.”²² Even though this concept came from discussions around legal disparities centered on African Americans, Crenshaw’s overarching argument is that it is impossible to separate race from gender, class from race, or gender from class when it comes to addressing the needs of an individual. Intersectionality has been used incorrectly inside and outside of feminism. It is important to be clear here: there have been ways in which intersectionality as a term has been universally applied to everyone; however, its actual intent is to directly address racially marginalized groups and the many levels of systemic and cultural discrimination. For example, yes, women are in fact a marginalized group, but Latina women also have to deal with the marginalization that comes from being Latina and woman. African American women have to deal with the discrimination that comes from being woman and black. Native women, Asian women, all face a doubled-down marginalization. The argument for intersectionality is a direct response to the womanist movement, giving us a clearer picture for the how we are different and why that needs to be acknowledged.

Our understanding of intersectionality as originally presented by Crenshaw is what prompts us to use the term when directly addressing issues involving a convergence of gender, race, and class identities. If all of these three are not present, we prefer to use the term “converging identities.” We feel this term maintains the integrity of intersectionality while still acknowledging that we all have multiple identities that can come into play at any given moment in any given situation. Crenshaw’s intersectionality challenges us to examine certain narratives from the perspective of race in order to identify the ways we can better support one another.

Learning about some of the women activists of color who are currently mobilizing and doing important work around this issue is essential as we move toward solidarity. For example, Standing Rock activist LaDonna Brave Bull Allard started the Sacred Stone Camp, part of the resistance efforts against the Dakota Access Pipeline.²³ Arab American activists are advocating for LGBTQI+ and immigration rights. For instance, Sandra Khalifa, an Egyptian American, is fighting to uphold the DREAM Act. Minnesota House Representative Ilhan Omar is the first Somali American elected to U.S. office. She advocates for the civil rights of women from Eastern Africa, seeks to alleviate poverty, and wants to provide free college tuition for families that earn under $125,000 a year.²⁴ These women are doing amazing work across economic, political, and social issues.

Both Kami and Joy have stories about what it means to exist as a woman in a patriarchal society. We have women in our circles that can cosign or agree to all our stories, but when Kami begins to talk about the ways in which her black female body has been inappropriately sexualized by both men and women without recourse because all black women are sexual objects before they are humans, Joy cannot understand that experience. When Joy talks about the ways in which she may have had to mute her queerness in order to advance, Kami cannot relate. Intersectionality brings the sum total of all the ways in which women can potentially be oppressed in this society and places them on the table, leaving nothing behind.

When it comes to sabotage, one of the biggest taboos is negating intersectionality as unimportant, or claiming intersectionality as “everybody’s issue.” Both are incorrect. The eye rolls in the conference room when the black woman talks about her struggles with finding a mentor who will boost her professional career, or the term “spicy” used to describe the voiced reactions of the Latina coworker, followed by collective chuckles and giggles from the rest of the office, express why intersectionality is of the utmost. These forms of sabotage communicate to women of color that there is no safe space to talk about how their race and ethnicity also impact their womanhood.

Action Steps

As you read through this book, you will find moments that encourage you to recall your own memories, moments where you will have questions, and moments where you will want to dig a little deeper. In an effort to keep this an intimate exchange between you as the reader and us as the authors, we will provide action steps to help you reflect a bit more, and start to implement strategies in the workplace. These action steps may come from a particular concept in a chapter, from an example or an anecdote shared, or from the author exchanges between Joy and Kami.

The following action steps are for anyone interested in understanding feminist history and your role in it. However, they might be most useful to diversity officers, coaches, human resource teams, and other leaders/activists in diversity and inclusion initiatives. It’s helpful to start with your own experiences with feminism and then move beyond to your organization’s implementation of feminist key issues and practices. Invoke the guidance of other feminist thought leaders who have done the heavy lifting and use their work to support your arguments.

› Review the brief history of feminism at the beginning of the chapter. Was anything new to you? If so, how has it changed your perspective?

› Read the author exchange between Kami and Joy in this chapter. Consider your own response to the question. How did you arrive to feminism? If you haven’t yet, what’s stopping you?

› How can you apply your knowledge of feminist movements to changes that need to be made within your organization? How can you help others do so?

› Find two or three feminist scholars, activists, or simply amazing women you have an affinity for but who are also different from you. (We provide some of our favorites in Appendix B.) Read at least one of their books, watch a movie about them, or do some thorough Internet searches, then tell stakeholders what you learned and pass it on. If you are a coach, provide mentorship and mastermind opportunities with your clients. Think about how you would facilitate book clubs and other types of resource sharing. For example, if you feel drawn to womanist scholars, read books by Patricia Hill Collins or collect poetry by Virginia Brindis de Salas. Find several quotes and actions that they have talked about and implement those in your personal and professional life. Frame the quotes and put them in your workspace as a reminder of this new perspective or new understanding about yourself and others.