Socialist Feminism and Triple Oppression: Claudia Jones and African American Women in American Communism

Next to Karl Marx’s grave in London’s Highgate cemetery is the grave of Claudia Jones (1915–1964), who was an unassuming yet ferocious civil rights and Communist leader. Claudia Jones spent her entire adult life working within radical working-class and black nationalist organizations formulating an internationalist ideology that encompassed feminism, black nationalism, and Marxism. She envisioned herself and others of African descent in a struggle against capitalism and colonialism. Jones also synthesized a link between black nationalism and feminism that would later be adopted by a younger generation of feminists. Additionally, she linked the black diaspora to third-world struggles in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. Jones’s life ended early because of lifelong illness, and she has largely been remembered, when remembered at all, in regards to her contributions to black nationalism, communism, and third-world struggles. But Jones’s ideology and practice provides a unique insight into the “difference” feminism of American Communist women at mid-century. Unfortunately, at the height of Cold War domestic hysteria in the United States, Jones was forced to focus her energies on a futile struggle to prevent her deportation. Jones contributed to American feminism an awareness of nonwhite and working-class women’s variant oppressions and differences among women that prevented a “universal” understanding of woman and feminism. She took her cues from a tradition among black women that recognized their oppression as unique and their liberation as fundamental to achieving equality. Jones also looked to the home and familial relations as a site for women’s oppression and eventual revolution. While Jones synthesized and popularized the “triple oppression” paradigm to describe black women’s oppression, she also articulated a socialist feminism that took into account not just race, but the disparate struggles of all working women.

Jones is a part of a long tradition of black American women that regarded their oppression as unique from other women and from black men. In its various manifestations, this feminism identified black women’s oppression as “double jeopardy,” Jane Crow, triple exploitation, or triple oppression. Sojourner Truth is an early example. She asserted her womanhood and embraced her racial identity while agitating for abolition. After emancipation, women’s organizations and some female leaders insisted that black women’s emancipation was central and urgent to the black freedom struggle. The voices became more diverse and clear, and the theory more refined in the early twentieth century. Black women began to formulate an understanding of their oppression, and some began to argue that to seek black women’s freedom would result in freedom for all, black and white. This emancipatory politics took on many forms and developed into a radical political agenda by the 1960s and 1970s with the advent of women’s liberation and third-world movements. However, Claudia Jones synthesized earlier manifestations of these theories from both liberal black feminism and radical black feminism, and articulated her version of a specifically class-based feminist black nationalism that would influence a later generation of women’s liberationists. While midcentury women’s rights activists have largely been ignored, Jones clearly took up an existing tradition and refined it in a manner that made it palatable and relevant to a later generation of feminists.

While black women were central in abolition and the rights movements after the Civil War, by the turn-of-the-century a young, educated, and empowered generation refined their predecessors emancipation politics into a coherent feminist theory. One example of an early black feminist thinker is educator and activist Anna Julia Cooper. In 1892, Cooper articulated the modern problems of the black woman in her text A Voice from the South. Listing the author as “A BLACK WOMAN OF THE SOUTH,” Cooper sought to give voice to the complaints and concerns of the black southern woman. She also sought to articulate her belief that black women’s emancipation was central to black progress. She argued that the starting point for “retraining...