Feminism

Although there are many African American feminist perspectives, contemporary African American feminists have identified the central themes in African American feminist thought as determined over a century of struggle in the United States. They include (1) commitment to an alternative social order based on African American women's unique lived experiences as members of two oppressed groups—blacks and women; (2) a commitment to fighting against race and gender inequality across differences; (3) the promotion of black female empowerment through voice, visibility, and self-definition; and (4) a belief in the interdependence of thought and action.

African American feminism from the nineteenth century to the present has evolved in response to the failure of the women's rights and black liberation [Page 321]movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to address black women's issues.

Because of sexism and racism, black women's concerns were rejected and ignored in the nineteenth century by whites and black men in the abolitionist movement; by black suffrage movements of that time, which were dominated by black men; and, by the nineteenth-century women's rights movement, dominated by white women. The same exclusion occurred during the black liberation movements (civil rights and Black Power) of the 1950s and 1960s and the women's movement of the 1970s. African American feminism grew from this pattern of exclusion and struggling against racial and gender inequalities.