Did second-wave feminism leave out women of colour?

The short answer

• A movement built in the image of its founders. The second wave's early texts and organizations grew from the experience of educated white women: suburban isolation, exclusion from professions and unwanted pregnancy. Other experiences received less attention. Friedan's book, for example, said almost nothing about the millions of women already working for wages; women facing racism, poverty or coerced sterilization also found their concerns missing. A movement must hear such experiences before it can make them part of its agenda.
• The pull of other loyalties. Many Black and Chicana women participated in civil-rights, Black Power and Chicano movements. Leaders of both sexes in those movements often called feminism a white middle-class luxury that would divide their communities. Women could face pressure both when joining white-led groups and when organizing as feminists within their own movements. Many also feared that criticizing Black or Chicano men publicly would give ammunition to racists who already depicted their communities as disordered. Separate groups gave them another place to pursue their concerns.
• The same issue meant different things. The same demand could mean different things in different lives. Mainstream feminists made abortion central to reproductive rights because unwanted pregnancy was the principal risk their leaders faced. Poor women of color also faced doctors and welfare officials who wanted them to have fewer children. Paid work might promise a suburban housewife freedom while bringing hardship to a domestic worker. Treating one experience as universal could conceal the needs of another group.
• Exclusion inside the organisations. The problem appeared inside organizations as well as in their agendas. Lesbians were pushed to NOW's margins in 1969 and 1970, while women of color reported being ignored or treated as tokens at meetings and marches. Many concluded that reform from within was impossible and built autonomous organizations led by those most affected. Aileen Hernandez, elected NOW's first Black president in 1970, later left, criticizing its failure to address minority women's concerns.

What it changed

From reproductive rights to reproductive justice. The Committee to End Sterilization Abuse and other groups pressed for safeguards against coercion. Federal rules in 1978 required a 30-day waiting period and consent in the patient's language, and banned sterilizing people under 21. In 1994 Black women activists coined “reproductive justice” for an account descended from the 1970s arguments: the rights to have children, not to have them, and to raise them safely.

Houston, 1977: inclusion in the official agenda. The federally funded National Women's Conference in Houston in November 1977 adopted a “minority women” plank drafted by Black, Latina, Asian American and Native American women. Coretta Scott King was among its champions. The gathering was the most diverse in the movement's history; conservative women also organized a counter-rally, defining the backlash taken up in the next chapter.

A literature that changed feminist theory. The criticism developed by women at the margins entered feminist thought through writing. Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa helped make the critique of white feminism central to it; Moraga and Anzaldúa's anthology This Bridge Called My Back appeared in 1981. In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw gave the concept the name “intersectionality,” which spread worldwide. The writers' essays became among the movement's most widely taught texts.

Fragile institutions. The organizations themselves had brief lives. The NWRO went bankrupt in 1975, the NBFO dissolved by the late 1970s and Combahee ended in 1980. They were small and poorly funded, and practical demands such as adequate income for mothers were largely defeated, culminating in welfare cuts in the 1990s. Their ideas nonetheless continued through books and later movements, giving them an influence that outlasted their institutions.