4.13 - The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality
Roots in Earlier Black Women's Activism
Throughout American history, Black women have been central to the struggles for freedom, racial equality, and gender equality alike. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, activists like Jarena Lee, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman resisted injustice and oppression as both enslaved and free women, laying the groundwork for generations of activism that would follow. When the Black feminist movement emerged in the 1970s, it drew direct inspiration from these earlier Black women activists and others who had long emphasized Black women's unique, layered experience of both racism and sexism simultaneously.
Jarena Lee, for example, became the first woman authorized to preach in the AME Church in the early 1800s, Sojourner Truth spoke out for both abolition and women's rights, and Harriet Tubman led enslaved people to freedom and later scouted and spied for the Union Army.
The Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective was a Boston-based Black feminist and lesbian organization, and its name itself carried deep historical meaning, taken directly from Harriet Tubman's famous Combahee River raid, the military operation during the Civil War that freed over 700 African Americans. Choosing that name tied the Collective's contemporary struggle directly back to that same tradition of Black women's leadership in the fight for liberation.
Their landmark Collective Statement, published in 1977, argued that Black women's liberation would ultimately free everyone in society, since achieving it would require dismantling all interlocking systems of oppression at once, racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia among them. This was a genuinely radical argument: rather than treating Black women's liberation as one issue among many, the Collective framed it as the key that would unlock liberation for all.
Womanism and Intersectionality
Writer Alice Walker coined the term "womanist" and defined it in her 1983 essay collection In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. In her definition, a womanist is a Black feminist or feminist of color who is committed to the survival and wholeness of her entire community, men included. The concept built directly on the earlier tradition of Black women's activism by opposing both racism within the broader feminist community and sexism within Black communities, refusing to treat either as a secondary concern. Walker's line "Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender" suggests womanism is a deeper, fuller version of feminism.
In 1989, legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the term "intersectionality," and she developed it further in the early 1990s. It's a framework for understanding the distinct, compounded experiences of Black women as their social, economic, and political identities interact with overlapping systems of inequality and privilege. Crenshaw's key example was a lawsuit against General Motors: Black women argued they were shut out of jobs, but the court rejected their case because GM hired Black men (in factory jobs) and white women (in office jobs). Looking at race alone or sex alone hid the discrimination only Black women faced. Intersectionality gave a formal, academic name to something Black women activists had been describing and living through for generations, connecting this newer Black feminist scholarship directly back to that much older tradition of activism.
This work has never really stopped either. Throughout the twentieth century and beyond, Black feminism has continued challenging Black women's marginalization both within mainstream white feminist movements and within broader Black political movements, insisting that Black women's specific experiences be recognized and centered rather than folded into either movement without full acknowledgment of their distinct position.
Required Sources
"The Combahee River Collective Statement," 1977
The Combahee River Collective formed in Boston in 1974, and three of its members, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier, wrote this statement in 1977. It explains that the group fights racism, sexism, homophobia, and class oppression at the same time, because in Black women's lives these systems are "interlocking" and can't be separated. It argues that if Black women were free, everyone would be free, since freeing them would require destroying every system of oppression. The statement criticizes racism in the white women's movement and sexism among Black men, and it is often credited with one of the first uses of the term "identity politics" (organizing around your own experience of oppression). Through its name it claims Harriet Tubman's legacy, and its ideas fed directly into womanism, intersectionality, and the concept of interlocking systems of oppression.
Combahee River Collective (Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier), "The Combahee River Collective Statement," April 1977
the major systems of oppression are interlocking
This statement from a Boston group of Black feminists explains that they fight racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class oppression at the same time, because in Black women's lives these systems can't be pulled apart. It argues that freeing Black women would mean ending every system of oppression, so it would free everyone, and it describes organizing around your own experience of oppression as identity politics. The CED includes it because its idea of interlocking oppressions led to later ideas like intersectionality.
Combahee River Collective, "The Combahee River Collective Statement" (1977). Source: Library of Congress, Women's and Gender Studies Web Archive