Expert answer:Need history help with women movement and black di
Answer & Explanation:Giddings-Womens Movement and Black Discontent.pdfOn pages 307 to 310, Giddings discusses three complex reasons why black
feminists broke from white feminists. Summarize in a sentence or two what
one of those reasons was. Use NO QUOTATIONS. Write your sentence(s)
entirely in your own words.
giddings_womens_movement_and_black_discontent.pdf
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Tbe lYoments Mouement and
-,
Black Discontent q
As far
zrs maoy Blacks were concerned, the emergence of the women’s
movement couldn’t have been more untimely or irrelevant. Historians fface its roots to l96L with the President’s Commission on the
Status of Iflomen chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. At a time when Black
students were languishing in southern jails, when Black full-time
working women were earning 57 percent of what their tUflhite peers
were earning, the commission concentrated its attention on the growing number of middle-class women who were forced to enter the labor
market in low-skill, low-paid jobs. In 1963, the year of the March on
$flashington, the Birmingham bombing, and the assassination of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the report from the commission was published. Although it did not go so far as to challenge the
uaditional roles of women, its litany of inequities, especially in employment, was telling. PresidentJohn Kennedy signed the Equal Pay
Act, the first federal legislation that prohibited discrimination on the
of sex.
In the same year, the publication of Betty Friedan’s Tbe Feminine
Mystique added fuel to the fire of a growing feminist discontent. The
author spoke to middle-class tUflhite women, bored in suburbia (an
escape hatch from inceasingly Black cities) and seeking sanction to
work at a “meaningful” job outside the home. Not only were the
basis
problems of the ttrThite suburban housewife (who may have had Black
domestic help) irrelevant to Black women, they were also alien to
them. Friedan’s observation that “I never knew a woman, when I was
growing up, who used her mind, played her own part in the wodd,
and also loved, and had children” seemed to come from another
planet.l
h L964, two developments spurred the women’s rnovernent to
a new level of intensity. The first of them, the Civil Rights Act, won
by blood sacrifice, provided the legal foundation for women’s rights
as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendmena had a cenrllry
-much
300,- WHSN AND
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I
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earlier. That wasn’t what the proponents of the Civil Rights Act had
in mind. But when the bill came to the House, Representative Howard Smith of Virginia tacked the word sex to Title VII, which prohib.
ited discrimination in employment. Emulating the tactics used after
the Civil Var, Smith’s purpose was to defeat the entire bill. Sex
equality in employment would be viewed as so ridiculous, he believed, that even those whose consciences were pricked by the plight
of Blacks wouldn’t be able to vote for it. There was m:uch ribaldry in
the Congress; the day Smith made his proposal was called “Ladies
Day” in the House. But evidently the good ol’ boys were laughing
so hard they missed a step. Some of their colleagues, particularly
Representative Martha Griffiths of Michigan, were able to marshal
forces sufficient to pass the bill-with its sex provision. In fact Griffiths
was going to propose the addition of sex herself, but when Smith
jumped the gun, she withdrew, figuring that his Machiavellian tactics
would gain at least one hundred more votes.
Yet it was clear that women had won only a battle, not the war.
The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission was the enforcement arm of Title VII and its first director, Herman Edelsberg, made
some alarming statements. He characterized the sex provision as a
“fluke,” one “conceived out of wedlock.” Such an attitude would be
a direct catalyst for the formation of the National Organization for
lVomen (NOUO.
At the same time, the feminist consciousness of tUfhite women in
the student movernent was also reaching a new plateau. This develop
ment had a gte tdeal to do with what was happening within SNCC.
In the Black organization’s formative years, the role of r$7hite women
activists had not been inconsequential. For example,Jane Stembridge,
a rU(hite Virginian, was brought to SNCC by Etla Baker and was one
of its earliest staff members. She and others who joined the organization were able to perform iust about any task in SNCC that they had
heart enough to do. With the “group-centered,” egalitafian values of
SNCC, any activist who worked hard inevitably had some say in policy
decisions. Thus many of the flhite women gained a respect for their
own abilities that would not have been possible in other organizations.
Additionally, they benefited from seeing Black women as a new kind
of role model.
Contrary to Friedan’s experience, Black women in SNCC not
only performed heroic deeds, but their activism did not preclude
many of them from marrying and having children. Most enlightening
was the exposure to the rural women who formed the backbone of the
Tbe lWomen’s lllotement and Black Discontent
^ 301
southern rnovement. “r have been thinking
about this,,, wrote stembridge in her notes. “Mrs. Hamei i,
*or” educated than I am. That
is-she knows more.” !7hat Fannie Lou
Hamer knew had rittle to do
with formal education, Stembridge*ro,”, ,..
. . She tno*, something
else. . . . she knows that she ir goIa.;;
s,.mbridge fert she had no such
knowledge about herself. “I ierrt in.o
society. I wCI there. And that
is where I learned that I was
bad. . . . Not ta.i”,y i”E i*,
sociary
shamefuf notguilty as a r7hite ro*t.rn.,
. . . not unequal”.t
as wornen
. . but Bad.’,
Perhaps Hamer’s isoration from
mains*eam society had saved
her from learning she was b”d ruth;;
gooa, s,”iciiage specuIated. “If she didn’t know that,
the way
she sings. she wourdn’t
,t
*ith herf,e”&;t
sing!
land
she
couldn’t speak the yat that she “i.,
,p””rs *a ,h; ;;y
is
this:
she announces. I d9 aot *”oun…-I
apologize.,;itJ-iir.rence,
stembridge concluded, *”s tt
i,”a”rroi u”.i’Llgr,t to be
ashamed of “herself, her body,”it.i-r,-ng
voice.,,2
However, the-sNCC of iieq4s was in
no position to incubate
the development of yhitel
-ln-*ose Vears.SNCC was going through
an identity crisis whichrrad leftth
e irganization in confusion. some
of that confusion could be traced io
tt Jir,.ritable tensions of interra_
cial liaisons between !flhite women
ana ghcr. men which reached a
pitch during the Freedom summei.
e-rurnir.
Sara Evans, put it this way:
“.,iuirioiit” period,
a*
rh..ouar,.?dil ,il
il
;;;;,
i*r
For Black men, sexual access to uThite
women challenged the
culrure’s ultimate symbol of their denied
manhood. And some of
the middre-crass women whose attentions
,h;y
had experienced
a denial
ilC
of their womanhooa i, ruili”g io?.ii”u.
,t
cheerteader standards of high schooro;”r,,i?
,o”
iiur”ri.y
prevalent in the fifties and iady
sixties.r
lo.*r r!4onships were constructive, noted Evans, but others had a
and “depersonalizing” r”*i”. The more ..enthusiastic,,
,.9f3tic”
vhite
women posed dangers
it”ir activities.*t”od”d’ueyond
sNCc circles into local southern
“rrr”r
co-murriti.s. The sexual tension of
Vhite women in SNCC, said Evans, -*as
to;h;il;A;t
key
feminism” but also “became a divisive ana
e*ptosive force within the civil
Many Black activists agreed that vhites
were creating more
problems in
sNcc than sohitionr. ny
the wall for a separatist movem.ni’*i
many of the r7hites were
“”
rq6A;”;;;;ff;;**
302,- ttr7snN AND
IU7HERE
I ENrrn
being “dernoted” accordingly. For tU(hite women, who were by now
budding feminists, this was a painful blow. They had their chance to
respond to the developments within SNCC at its flaveland Confer’
ence held in L964. The purpose of the conference was to sort out the
problems through discussions and position papers on various issues
confronting the organizationihAmong the papers presented for discus’
sion was one, unsigned, criticizing SNCC for its treatment of women.
The paper cited the relegation of women to clerical work and their
exclusion from the decision-making process. It complained of the
“,lssumption of male superiority” in SNCC, one “as widespread and
deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.”‘ Amid all of SNCC’s
other concerns, the position paper on women was either ignored or
ridiculed. Of the latter attitude, Stokely Carmichael’s rebuttal, “The
^,
only position for women in SNCC is prone,” was the most infamoustf,
That Black wornen in SNCC did not rise en rnasse against such
flagrantsexism reflected a number of factors: First of all, most of them
saw the race issue as so pressing that they had little attention to spare
for questions of sex. “I’m certain that our single-minded focus on the
issues of racial discrimination and the Black struggle for equality
blinded us to other issues,” remarked Cynthia U(ashington, a Black
project director.6 Second, Black women such as Muriel Tillinghast,
though angered by Carmichael’s statement, were not aware of sex
discrimination in SNCC at the time. Men usually held the top sPots,
but the charge that women were shut out from decision-making or
leadership positions didn’t really hold up. flomen like Ruby Doris
Smith (who would soon become executive secretary), Diane Nash,
and Donna Richards Moses were in SNCC’s inner circles. Others, like
Tillinghast and U7ashington, had been assigned the non-sexstereoryped roles of project directors in the South-by Carmichael
himself. In fact, the influence of Black women was actually increasing
at the time; it was White women who were being relegated to minor
responsibilities, in part because of indiscriminate sexual behavior. If
Black women had complaints of their treatment in SNCC, those complaints often centered around the “brothers’ “role in their White “sisters’ ” sexual liberation. All this was not to say that there was no sexual
discrimination in SNCC-iames Foreman himself admitted there was
it was not perceived to be as “crippling” as other problems. In
-but
any case, by L96L65 such
ry
King, the authors of the unsigned position p@
7
Tbe lVomen’s Motenent and Black Discontent 303
^
toward the Students fpr a Democratic Society (SDS), which was
predominantly ttr7hite.to, echoing the scenario of the nineteenth
cenury, tUflhite wornen developed their feminism in a Black organization and then turned the thrust of their activist energies elsewhere.
And as had happened a century earlier, the development occurred at
a time when both the Black and women’s movements were being
radicalized.
In 1965, the year that Malcolm
X was assassinated and U7atts set
off a chain reaction of major urban uprisings, the concept of
“ITornen’s Liberation”-4 slsp beyond “rights”-sr4s first presented
at an SDS conference. It was laughed offthe floor.7 By 1967 , the year
that Black Power called for tU7hites to be purged from the movement,
radical feminisa did succeed in passing a resolution calling for their
full panicipation in SDS. It was nevertheless clear that men had not
lost their derisive anirude toward the woman question. The SDS
publication, Neu Ldt Notes, bore on the cover of the issue that contained the resolution a free-hand illusration of a girl in a baby-doll
dress holding a sign that said, “W’e want our rights and we want them
now!”8 Uflhen an SDS wornan spoke at a demonstration at Richard
Nixon’s inauguration two years later, she was jeered. “Take her off
the stage and fuck her,” an SDS man cried out. tUfhite women may
have had their complaints about SNCC, but the comparison to SDS
was revealing. Betty Carmen, a member of both organizations, ob.
served: “As a woman I was allowed to develop and had and was given
more responsibility in SNCC than I ever was in SDS. It would have
been tougher for me to develop at all in SDS.”e Despite, or perhaps
because of, the ridicule of male radicals, $7hite women’s liberation
groups began to proliferate throughout the country. In l!56, these
relatively radical leftist groups would be joined by another type of
women’s group: the National Otganization for lVomen.
NOf was composed primarily of “mainstream” women: members of the state commissions on women, employees of various levels
of government, trade union representatives, business and professional
women. Like the old American Equal Rights Association organized
after the Civil Var, it sought to develop a coalition with prominent
Black women. Among NOV’s early Black participants and/or founding members were: Aileen Hernandez, forrner ItG’SfU union organizer and an EEOC commissioner; Pauli Murray, an Episcopalian priest
and lawyer who helped write the brief for the lYbin v. Cook case
which struck down state laws denying women the right to serve on
304,- WueN AND tUfHrne I ENrrR
juries; Fannie Lou Hamer; Representative Shirley Chisholm (D,
N.Y.); Addie L. ITyatt, international vice-president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters Union; and Anna Arnold Hedgeman, former
executive director of the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee and assistant to the administrator of
the Federal Security Agency. In fact, the stated purpose of NOV was
to act like an “NAACP for women” to ensure the enforcement of the
Civil Rights Act. In later years the organization would go through ia
own identity crisis. There were regional and ideological conflicts,
resulting in the more radical contingent pulling out of NOV because
of its hierarchical strucftrre, and the more conservative elements withdrawing because of the otganization’s endorsement of a woman’s
right to have an abortion. The leadership of NOIUT also quarreled with
the non-mainstream elements within its own ranks. For instance, Betty
Friedan, NOW’s first president, initiated a campaign to undermine
the influence of lesbian advocates.
Although NOUfl had made some important breakthroughs by the
late sixties-notably the prohibition of sex discrimination by holders
of federal contracts-its significance was still largely ignored by
Blacks. One reason was that the achievements of the women’s movement in general were obscured by derisive media on the one hand and
by urgent racial events on the other. In 1968 for example-the year
of Martin Luther King’s assassination and the explosion of urban
ghettos, the year of a planned “Poor People’s March,” which had
been conceived by the grass-roots
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