No Permanent Waves: Recasting Histories of U.S. Feminism

3. Black Feminisms and Human Agency

As both an analytical tool and a political paradigm, black feminisms— referred to here in the plural because there is no one feminism—are fluid and diverse, focusing in various ways on the convergence of race, gender, sexuality, class, spirituality, and culture. This diversity is often oversimplified in an effort to provide a single, coherent picture of black women activists. As human agents against domination, black women’s feminist practices and theories “teach us about the complex interworkings of changing structures of power.”1 The primary expressions of black feminisms in the United States are marked by three distinct periods that are directly connected to, and are outgrowths of, key movements in African American history: the abolitionist movement, which culminated with the suffragists’ securing passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920; the modern civil rights and black power movements, which peaked with the enforcement during the 1970s of Title VII and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964; and the post–civil rights era, which helped to usher in the professionalization and institutionalization of feminisms. Although these periods overlap in part with traditional conceptualizations of feminist waves, they also challenge—in both their theory and practice—any linear narrative of a singular feminist history. In order to fully comprehend the development and the transformative nature of black feminisms, via the political, personal, and moral autonomy of women’s agency, this essay identifies central voices assessing problems (theory) as well as turning points where women acted to secure their goals (practice). Black Feminisms and Human Agency ULA Y. TAYLOR 61 3 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb Abolitionists and the Roots of Black Feminisms The development of a distinctly feminist consciousness began during the enslavement period. Slave codes and laws defined black folks as chattel and thereby allowed “owners” of their bodies to deny them rights and privileges of citizenship, to physically exploit their labor, and to abuse them for their perverse pleasure. As legal “property,” enslaved women were constantly confronted with sexual abuse and lacked even the limited legal recourse used by their “free” counterparts. Primarily because of the mythical, stereotypical images surrounding black womanhood—a dichotomy, as Deborah Gray White has pointed out, that included the Jezebel to excuse the sexual exploitation of black women on the one hand and the Mammy to codify the domestic role of black women in households on the other—both “free” and enslaved women were blamed for their own victimization.2 Like their enslaved sisters, “free” women could not escape the harmful consequences of these myths; and, as abolitionists, they organized simultaneously against slavery as a legal institution and against racially gendered sexual oppression. To argue for racial and sexual equality in an environment that was hostile to both required courage and a passion for righteousness. The abolitionist and liberal reformer Sojourner Truth is celebrated as the fountainhead of black feminist thinking in the nineteenth century. Born into slavery in New York State around 1799, Truth became an itinerant preacher (the meaning of her name) in 1843 and went on to argue for the black feminist cause in evangelical language. Slave status, she preached, denied black women the “God given rights” of motherhood, protection from exploitation, and their innate feminine qualities.3 Truth’s Bible-based feminism, charged by her riveting personal testimony, called attention to the way slavery stranded black women on the periphery of “becoming a woman.” Although Truth was not the only black woman of her era—others include Jarena Lee and Maria Stewart—to advocate for women’s rights through an appeal to the Bible, she was often the lone black voice among a chorus of prominent white feminists.4 By challenging the dominant ways of thinking in her time, Truth disrupted a political movement that sought to keep black women on the outskirts. As a pioneering black feminist, Truth is particularly influential among contemporary feminists who, as Nell Painter observes, often combine the 1851 “ar’n’t I a woman?” speech long attributed to Truth with her 1858 gesture ULA Y. TAYLOR 62 of proving her sexual identity by publicly baring her breast to a heckling white audience. Although the merging of these events created an image of defiance that many modern feminists also appreciate, Painter points out that it does not offer an accurate portrayal of the evangelical preacher herself.5 Hoisting a revolutionary banner on the liberal Truth speaks to the unwillingness of...