:Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

Abstract

Benita Roth's timely and insightful sociological account of second-wave feminism combines two trends in the recent surge of writings on 1970s feminism: new attention to memories/memoirs of activists, known and unknown, and the search for a way out of the myth that feminism did not matter to women of color. Roth addresses both and along the way makes headway in working out a number of historiographical issues that have long burdened histories of the second wave. In terms of oral history, Roth's is a compensatory strategy intended to bring in histories of women and groups whose manifestos and position papers did not appear in edited collections like Robin Morgan's Sisterhood is Powerful (1970) or Toni Cade's The Black Woman (1970) and whose voices have not been well archived. The group of feminists under examination came of age politically in what Roth calls a “competitive social movement sector” in the late 1960s and 1970s when the ferment of reform and revolution had the potential to divide political allegiances of women. Using interviews done in 2000, Roth treads her way through the familiar story of female activists facing the sexism of their male peers in movements like black nationalism, Chicano rights, and the New Left. To this she adds the recollection of those women who chose to leave women's caucuses within (for lack of a better term) home movements to form organized feminist groups. Their memories record the disappointment and anger at the restricted roles they as “women” played in student movements and the hostility and ridicule they faced from their male peers as they created their own race and class-specific feminisms.