The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (review)

Winifred Breines relates a difficult and contested history in The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. She begins by asking why there was no interracial feminist movement, and in the end, illuminates key issues in American social relations and political activism. Breines focuses on key groups and issues, revisiting the politics of gender and sexuality in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Power Movement and using two Boston organizations, Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective, to examine white and black socialist feminisms.

She illuminates the deep appeal of identity politics to white and black feminists at a pivotal moment in United States history. White women and people of color formed the social movements of the 1960s and beyond not only to rectify deep injustices in American society, but also to claim the right to speak with authority about their own lives. When activists tried to work together across differences in race, class, gender, and sexuality, they found that their differences in experiences, resources, and perceptions created almost insurmountable barriers to cooperation.

Identity politics evolved in response to those dilemmas, even as the political mobilization of identities created ongoing problems. White feminists organized consciousness raising groups that profoundly shaped their personal lives and political commitments. Their belief in an ostensibly universal gender system alienated black women, whose challenges were deepened by racism and whose lives did not mirror those of white women in gender socialization or material circumstances. Breines, for example, concludes that white feminism's critique of patriarchal family relations was "cold" and did not acknowledge the importance of black families as sites of resistance in a racist society. More importantly, black women understood racial justice to be their most pressing political priority.

In response, some black women formed autonomous feminist organizations. According to Breines, this separatism created a highly contentious path to a sometimes workable politics of alliance between black women and white socialist feminists in Boston. Citing the Coalition for Women's Safety, Breines concludes that when white feminists allowed black women to lead while they provided pragmatic organizational support, issues of race were defused. That arrangement did not translate well in other settings. Feminist workshops devised to address racism in the feminist movement often ended in anger, recriminations, and guilt.

Though she understands that black women's rage carried with it their anger at their treatment in the society at large, Breines understates the level of dysfunction that sometimes characterized interactions between white feminists and women of color. She rightly concludes that black feminists developed significant analyses of race and gender in their organizations and publications and that white feminists lost the possibilities presented by interracial communication and organization. She fails, however, to explore the closures entailed when black feminists distanced themselves so fully from white feminists. Nonetheless, this is a courageous and insightful book.