The feminist movement of the late twentieth century provoked the most pronounced and widespread debate over gender in recorded history. Discussion often reached a heated pitch, as it did in other reform movements of the day. Feminists had a variety of concerns, often depending on their nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, and class. Opinion on these issues could produce conflict among activists and serious divisions on goals and policies, as the authors of the Combahee River Statement demonstrated (Excerpt 1). At times, concerns over issues like equal opportunity in the workplace were directed at government policies, as in the case of the Soviet worker (Excerpt 2). Italian feminists saw all the disabilities imposed by government as characteristic of larger problems (Excerpt 3), while Germans explicitly connected the cause of feminism to that of environmentalism (Excerpt 4). With the advances in global travel and televised news, comparisons came to the fore as well (Excerpt 5).

1. Criticizing White Feminism

In the United States, black women, like several other minority groups, found themselves marginalized in both the feminist and civil rights movements. In 1977, some of them issued the Combahee River Statement.

Black, other third world, and working women have been involved in the feminist movement from its start, but both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself have served to obscure our participation. . . .

Black feminist politics also have an obvious connection to movements for Black liberation, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s. . . . It was our experience and disillusionment within these liberation movements, as well as experience on the periphery of the white male left, that led to the need to develop a politics that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of Black and white men. . . .

Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy.

Source: “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage, 1994), 177–79.

2. Criticizing Socialism

Official policy in the Soviet Union stated that socialism had brought women full equality, eliminating the need for feminism. In the 1970s, however, clusters of Russian women announced their dissatisfaction with so-called equality under socialism. Tatyana Mamonova, the editor of a collection of Russian women’s writings such as this from a railroad worker, was ultimately expelled from the USSR.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the current equality means only giving women the right to perform heavy labor. . . . [I]n our day the woman, still not freed from the incredible burden of the family, strains herself even harder in the service of society. The situation . . . is true not only in large cities but also in villages. On collective and state farms, women do the hardest and most exhausting work while the men are employed as administrators, agronomists, accountants, warehouse managers, or high-paid tractor and combine drivers. In other words, men do the work that is more interesting and more profitable and does not damage their health.

Source: Tatyana Mamonova, ed., Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 8.

3. Policy and Patriarchy

In Italy, as in the Soviet Union, feminism had an underground quality involving mimeographed tracts and graffiti on buildings; women formed their own bookshops and published small newspapers. But others lobbied hard to get legislation on divorce and abortion changed, while in 1976 the Feminist Movement of Rome issued this article in its paper.

Patriarchal society is based on authoritarian-exploitative relationships, and its sexuality is sadomasochistic. The values of power, of the domination of man over the other [woman], are reflected in sexuality, where historically woman is given to man for his use. . . .

The idea of woman as man’s property is fundamental to her oppression and she is often the only possession that dominant men allow exploited men to keep. . . .

In other words woman is given to the (exploited) man as compensation for his lack of possessions. . . .

We denounce as the latest form of woman’s oppression the idea of a “sexual revolution” where woman is forced to go from being one man’s object to being everybody’s object, and where sadomasochistic pornography in films, in magazines, in all the forms of mass media that brutalize and violate woman, is bandied about as a triumph of sexual liberty.

Source: “Male Sexuality—Perversion,” Movimento Femminista Romano (1976), quoted in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, eds. Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 68–69.

4. Feminism and Environmentalism

Environmentally aware feminists took a different approach, such as announced in this “Manifesto of the ‘Green’ Women.” It was originally a 1975 speech made in West Germany in the context of the moon landing and other accomplishments in space.

Man has actually landed on the moon—an admirable feat. . . . We “Green” women . . . believe that men belong to our environment. In order to rescue that environment for our children, we want to confront this man, this adventurer and moon explorer. A female cosmonaut from a so-called socialist republic doesn’t justify this energy-wasting enterprise for us at a time when three-fourths of the earth’s population is suffering from malnutrition.

Our inability to solve immediate problems may tempt us into escape—to the moon, into careerism, escape into ideologies, into alcohol or other drugs. But one group cannot escape completely: women, society’s potential mothers, who must give birth to children, willingly or unwillingly, in this polluted world of ours.

Source: Delphine Brox-Brochot, “Manifesto of the ‘Green’ Women,” in German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature, eds. Edith Hoshino Altbach et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 314.

5. Comparing the Situation of European and African Women

In an age when communications technology was bringing greater knowledge of conditions around the world, there were more frequent comparisons of situations faced by Western women with those faced by women in distant regions. The Malian politician Awa Thiam offered such an analysis in her Speak Out, Black Sisters (1986).

In any European country, when a husband goes in for that form of semi-condoned polygamy that consists of taking a mistress—or several—the wife can have recourse to the law by instituting action for divorce, or at least obtain support for better treatment from him. Such a course of action is not possible for a Muslim woman, who grows up in a system of institutionalized polygamy, where this is not permitted. What is more, such action would appear aberrant in a Black African context, in which marriage is generally religious, not civil. And this is the main basis for our claim that the Black woman’s struggle is of a different nature from that of her White sister. The majority of European women do not lack essentials, whereas Black women are fighting for survival as much in the field of institutions as in the manner of her daily existence.

Source: Awa Thiam, Speak Out, Black Sisters: Feminism and Oppression in Black Africa, quoted in Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from Ancient Egypt to the Present, ed. Margaret Busby (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994), 477–78.

Questions to Consider