Reframing the 'whiteness' of U.S. Feminism : the protest movement, radical feminism, and the abjection of whiteness

    Research output: Chapter in Book / Conference PaperChapter

    Abstract

    ![CDATA[Histories that track the rise of second-wave feminism frequently note that the U.S. women’s movement, in both its active constituents and the conceptualization of its aims, remained overwhelmingly white until well into the 1970s, when “the difference debate” gripped feminism. Whilst it has become customary to acknowledge the whiteness of late 1960s/early 1970s U.S. feminism, and evidence demonstrates that the initial phases of second-wave feminism were indeed profoundly shaped by a blindness to the circumstances of women of colour, what is rarely interrogated are the very conditions that produced this “whitewashing”. Second-wave feminism comprised a spectrum of groups with widely divergent understandings of women’s subordination, and an equally divergent set of strategies for putting cultural and political change into effect. However, in the late 1960s a small number of women’s groups who identified either as “politicos” or “feminists” – those now labelled “radical feminists” – came to dominate the political scene of feminism. In the following pages, I consider this relationship between the emergence of radical feminism in the late 1960s and the changing nature of the North American social protest movement. In particular, I track the origins of “white” feminism by situating radical feminism’s blindness to differences of colour in relation to the problematic currency of whiteness within the broader context of the larger social protest movement.]]
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationNew world coming : the sixties and the shaping of global consciousness
    EditorsKaren Dubinsky, Catherine Krull, Susan Lord, Sean Mills, Scott Rutherford
    Place of PublicationCanada
    PublisherBetween the Lines
    Pages274-283
    Number of pages10
    ISBN (Print)9781897071519
    Publication statusPublished - 2009

    Keywords

    • feminism
    • protest movements

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