Troubling Feminism, Troubling Race

Why, when so many feminists in the United States opposed racism, did black and white women develop separate feminist movements during the 1960s and '70s? The charge that the Second Wave of feminism was primarily a white women's movement and that it was racist, has troubled feminism since the late 1960s. And yet, as recent scholarship indicates, women of color were often at the forefront of feminist activism and supplied feminism with some of its most critical insights. Wini Breines's The Trouble Between Us addresses this puzzle by examining "white and black feminists' political histories" in the 1960s to better understand the development of racially distinct socialist feminisms, and the subsequent emergence of an anti-racist, coalitional orientation by the late '70s. In doing so, the book provides an invaluable and critical exploration of just how profoundly race and struggles over racist hierarchies shaped feminism itself. The Trouble Between Us also enters an ongoing debate over what best represents the feminist movement, its origins and parameters, its premises and promises. Today it is widely held that feminism cannot stand on a simple gender analysis but depends on understanding the interrelatedness of gender, race, class, sexuality, nation; in turn, anti-racist, global, and coalitional politics are vital to the movement. According to Breines, the roots of this anti-racist, coalitional imperative are to be found in socialist feminism. The Trouble Between Us is a fascinating and path-breaking account that moves beyond the charge of racism in feminism to an analysis of race conflict and interchange integral to feminism and its continually emerging contours. At the same time, it reveals the historiographic challenges of telling a bifurcated history as a single story; in this monograph, they show up most notably around sources and what they imply about the labor behind anti-racist analysis and about sexuality in the movement.

The Trouble Between Us is the story of a feminism shaped as much by African American women as by white women and—perhaps most importantly—by the troubles between them. Drawing on historical documents, memoirs, secondary sources, interviews, fiction, and personal conversations, the work places the origins of feminism in the southern civil rights movement. The first two chapters narrate women's experience of interracial organizing in formations such as Freedom Summer. It becomes clear that, while all participants were driven by visions of integration, white women's romanticization of interracial harmony and unity was suspect—and not easily shared by black women—from the outset. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a catalyzing role in the development of race separatism in the civil rights and black power movements, and also in the divergent development of gender consciousness among white and black women.

From this frayed situation, Breines picks up the thread of socialist feminism as it emerges in the Boston area: "socialist feminism was the feminist current most closely linked to the anti-capitalist New Left and black movement, especially the Black Panther party. Its goal was to create a society in which resources were shared equally, not simply provide more opportunities for women. . . . [O]ne of the central struggles of young white socialist feminists was to create a racially inclusive movement" (p. 6). But black and white feminisms emerged on "separate tracks," and so Breines give them separate chapters. Bread and Roses, a predominantly white socialist feminist organization, began in 1969 with naïve presumptions of interracial unity. Despite their failure to organize across race and class, white socialist feminists persevered through painful experiences of difference and began to develop more complex understandings of racism by the mid- to late-1970s. Meanwhile, black socialist feminism—especially represented by the written documents of the Combahee River Collective—"developed on its own track," contending with notions of black solidarity within the Black Power movement and also with a burgeoning white women's movement. On different paths, black feminists and white socialist feminists generated new ways...