#moynihan

Black women probably participated in the movement in disproportionate numbers (Payne 1990), filling roles that formed the backbone of the movement and exercising leadership "behind the scenes." Women were most often "bridge" leaders (Robnett 1997), using local networks to link new activists to national organizing. Their "invisibility" as leaders within the movement (McNair Barnett 1993) has been exacerbated by the tendency to define leadership as belonging only to those with public-speaking roles. For example, Ella Baker chose a place in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that was out of the spotlight so as not to threaten male egos; nonetheless, she was a key participant in that organization (at one point its interim executive director) and also helped "midwife" the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) into existence. Baker insisted that women's work was at the core of the Civil Rights struggle:

“All the churches depended... on women, not men. Men didn't do the things that had to be done and you had a large number of women who were involved in the bus boycott. They were the people who kept the spirit going.” (Payne 1989:890)

And Ella Baker was not alone. Gloria Richardson, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Diane Nash, and Jo Ann Robinson form an incomplete list of women who were heroes of the movement, if not as widely visible to the public as someone like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Brock 1990; Fair Burks 1990; Giddings 1984; Locke 1990).

Much of Black women's energy in the movement was used for stereotypical "female" tasks, but the Civil Rights movement also gave Black women a chance to work alongside men in "nontraditional ways" (Marable 1978; Omolade 1994). Women went to jail (and were beaten there) as they handled bus boycotts, field projects, voter registration drives, and challenges to state and national Democratic party leadership. Cynthia Washington had her own voting rights project in Bolivar County, Mississippi, which she did not consider to be an "exceptional" thing for a woman to be coordinating (Washington 1979:238). Even later Black feminist critiques of sexism within the Civil Rights movement acknowledged that women have been given the opportunity "to do far more significant work than white women in their movement" (Bender 1969, citing Eleanor Holmes Norton). Omolade (1994:124) even argued that "traditional" female work took on new meaning in the "radical context and communal settings" of the movement, enabling women to become not just "wives, mothers, or maids," but also "lovers, friend, and comrades."3

Two intertwined changes in the Civil Rights movement of the mid-1960s affected Black women's roles within the movement. First, the social base of the movement shifted; it became younger and more northern. The southern community base that had fostered women's participation became less important to the Civil Rights movement as the student vanguard changed that movement. Second, an ideological program of advocating middle-class, traditional gender roles as a means of remaking the revolutionary Black family developed as part of Black Liberation ideology. Black women who had been active in social protest organizations were asked to become merely supportive and secondary to men. [...]

The Black Liberation ideology that accompanied the Civil Rights movement's shift to a northern, younger social base was characterized by what Giddings (1984) has called a philosophy of "masculinism." This ideological development proved crucial to the emergence of Black feminism. By the mid-1960s, integrationist approaches in the Civil Rights movement gave way to Black Power strategies and resurgent Black nationalism, forming the two major ideological components of Black Liberation. Black Liberation as an ideology was more suited to working within urban and northern contexts, and more popular with younger African Americans; sympathy for the "Black Power" slogan was greater among the young and those born in the North, whose southern roots were more attenuated (Aberbach and Walker 1971).

There were initially significant differences between Black Power and Black nationalism, but by the end of the decade, the two were difficult to distinguish from each other. SNCC was instrumental in the development of Black Power ideology; Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton--authors of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America--were SNCC leaders when they began to formulate their ideas in 1966 and when their book was published in 1967 (Matusow 1971). Black Power political philosophy held that African Americans should strive for self-sufficiency and economic progress. Carmichael and Hamilton, holding up ethnic immigrant groups as models, argued that Black people needed to question the benefits of mere formal equality; to become economically empowered, they needed to turn inward, toward strengthening Black communities. Building on older nationalist ideas of self-sufficiency within the Black community, they expressed frustration at the limits of the Civil Rights agenda.

Carmichael and Hamilton were silent about Black women helping the community to gain economic empowerment. Virtually the only mention they make of women's roles was that of

“another set of leaders in the Black community in Lowndes County. This was a group of middle-aged ladies, who knew the community well and were well known. They were to play a very important role in the political organization of the Blacks. They had considerable influence in the Black community--being staunch church members, for example--but they possessed no power at all with the white community.” (Carmichael and Hamilton 1967:102-103)

In contrast to Black Power's silence about Black women, Black nationalism in the mid-1960s was strongly characterized by masculinist discourse and practice.4 According to the nationalists, the truly "revolutionary" Black woman was a supportive one, who kept house while the Black man kept revolution, so as to allow him to reclaim his public manhood (Marable 1983). Despite the work of Black women in the Civil Rights movements, and the very public presence of a small number of women in Black nationalist organizations themselves (e.g., Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, and Elaine Brown), Black nationalist organizations such as Maulana Ron Karenga's US movement and the Black Muslims advocated restricting opportunities for activism by women (Brown 1992). In this traditionalist take on women's roles, the Black nationalist resurgence of the 1960s differed from the older formulations. Whatever tensions existed between Black men and women in activist groups (see Gray White 1999), older Black nationalism did not seem to require as rigid an ideology of traditional sex roles, as was evidenced by Amy Garvey's strong advocacy of women's equality and the key role she played in the 1920s Garveyist movement (Adler 1992; Gray White 1999; White 1984).5

During the 1960s, masculinism was very much present in other parts of the Left and in other parts of the Black community; for example, the traditional gender role ideology of the much-admired Black Muslims added legitimacy to masculinist ideas about delimiting women's roles in the movement (Kashif 1970). However, Black feminists (both then and now) have argued that the masculinist cast of Black nationalism in the 1960s was a reaction to the "Black matriarchy" theory in the 1965 Moynihan report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (Dubey 1994; Giddings 1984; Gray White 1999; hooks 1981; Murray 1975; see Pittman quoted in Cantwell 1971; Wallace 1996). The resurgent masculinism of Black Liberation was therefore tied to state intervention into the relationships that existed within the Black family; Black feminism in part responded to the aftereffects of this intervention. In reaction to the Moynihan report, Black masculinists attempted to counter the depiction of Black men as the most abject victims of racial discrimination, with Black women putatively better off by virtue of participation in the labor force. The report concluded that the Black family was "matriarchal" and "deviant," because women held an inappropriately large amount of power (this despite the fact that Black women's status as the most economically deprived group in the country was also noted). This "deviant" family structure hindered the progress of Black men, and, by extension, that of the Black community itself (Dubey 1994; see also Marx Ferree and Hess 2000).

Black nationalists condemned the report as racist, but many responded that the patriarchal family had to be reinstituted so as to right the historical wrongs done to the Black male. With this analysis in place, Black nationalist organizations "prescribed clearly restricted roles for black women in the movement" (Dubey 1994:18). The behind-the-scenes roles that women played in the Civil Rights movement were no longer far enough behind the scenes; women were to be supportive and subordinate, producing "male warriors for the revolution" within newly patriarchal families (Dubey 1994:18). Existing Black family structures, which were based on extended kinship networks, and where illegitimacy carried less stigma than in middle-class white society, were to be changed in favor of the nationalist model of a nuclear patriarchal family. This stance on the need to return to "traditional"--even if largely fictional--gender roles in the Black community was also accompanied by calls for Black women to end their use of birth control. At the Black Power conference held in Newark in 1967, organized by Amiri Baraka, an anti-birth control resolution was passed (Ross 1993); the possibility of Black women helping to carry out Black genocide by using birth control would continue to be a hotly contested issue between Black nationalists and emerging Black feminists, as will be discussed later.

In general, then, the Moynihan report was seized upon by many Black male activists as both a manifestation of white racism and proof that Black women out of their traditional place were abetting that racism. As Gray White (1999:200) argued, the report "legitimized the perception of black women as unnaturally strong and emasculating." But the masculinist reaction to Moynihan also found itself challenged by Black feminist organizing, as some Black women activists, facing problems in their ongoing struggles as activists, responded by uncovering the contradictions that confronted them.

Black Feminists Respond: Early Organizations By 1968, Black feminists had responded publicly to the Black Liberationist/nationalist emphasis on traditional gender roles. Their critiques were nuanced ones, directed as much at white society as at the changes in the Black movement. They condemned advocacy of a patriarchal family structure by Black Liberationists even as they attacked the racism they found in Moynihan's depiction of the Black family. Additionally, Black feminists were staunchly anticapitalist, attributing the shortcomings of existing movements to a failure to carry through on the full implications of revolutionary politics. [...]

The Black Woman, Black Liberation, and Middle-Class Style The members of TWWA [Third World Women’s Alliance] and the Mount Vernon Group were not entirely on their own; Toni Cade (Bambara) (1970a:107) wrote that in the late 1960s, it seemed "that every organization you can name has had to struggle at one time or another with seemingly mutinous cadres of women getting salty about having to man the telephones or fix the coffee while the men wrote the position papers and decided on policy." By 1970, the voices of the "mutinous cadres" of women described by Cade (Bambara) were gathered into her watershed edited collection entitled The Black Woman. Conceived as a dialogue with the Black movement--but unable to avoid some dialogue with white women's liberation--the book was organized out of her "impatience" with the lack of real information about the lives and politics of Black women (1970b: 10). The contributors to the collection were primarily writers and activists who spoke as members of older women's groups, Black liberation groups, Civil Rights groups, New Left groups, and no groups at all.

As might be expected, many of the pieces in The Black Woman were characterized by concerns over Black Liberationist/ nationalist reactions to the Moynihan report, and the specific failure of those reactions to maintain revolutionary consistency regarding gender roles. As noted, [Frances] Beal's "Double Jeopardy" appeared in the collection; one of the Mount Vernon Group's position papers appeared, entitled "On the Position of Poor Black Women in this Country" (which, like "Statement on Birth Control," was widely reprinted and distributed throughout the white women's liberation movement). In this piece, [Patricia] Robinson and her group continued criticism of middle-class Black leaders as a self-interested elite leading poor Blacks down the garden path of capitalism, linking class, gender, and racial oppression as belonging to one grand package:

“Capitalism is a male supremacist society.... All domestic and international political and economic decisions are made by men and enforced by males.... Women have become the largest oppressed group in a dominant, male, aggressive, capitalistic culture.... Rebellion by poor black women, the bottom of a class hierarchy... places the question of what kind of society will the poor black woman demand.... Already she demands the right to have birth control, like middle class black and white women.... She allies herself with the have-nots in the wider world and their revolutionary struggles.... Through these steps ... she has begun to question aggressive male domination and the class society which enforces it, capitalism.” (Robinson et al. 1970a:196)

Robinson and the group argued for a united front of middle-class Black and white women who would join poor Black women in continuing to expose male oppression. At the "bottom of a class hierarchy," poor Black women in concert with others would be able to lead this united front toward liberation for all exploited people (1970a: 196).

The anticapitalist critique of American society and the Black Liberation movement was present in other contributors' work in The Black Woman. In her essay, Gwen Patton (1970) also argued that capitalism was at the root of what she called the "Victorian Philosophy of Womanhood." According to Pam Allen, herself an activist in the Civil Rights and white women's liberation movement, Patton sent Bob Allen (Pam Allen's husband) a draft of her piece for the collection in August of 1968; Pam Allen thought it should be published because "it would be the first time we (or perhaps any paper) have printed a black woman's objection to women assuming supportive roles to black men" (Allen 1968b). Arguing that Black male militants should be more savvy about the intent and impact of the Moynihan report, Patton chastised Black male activists for not seeing through the report:

“Black men... responded] positively toward Black Power and could assert their leadership, which included a strengthening of their masculinity Black women will now take the back position [A] victory for the capitalistic system! Black men are now involved with keeping their women in line by oppressing them more, which means that Black men do not have time to think about their own oppression. The camp of potential revolutionaries has been divided.” (1970:146-147)

Patton recommended that Black women challenge Black men directly, so that the Victorian philosophy "of men on top, women on bottom" (1970:147-148) could be destroyed and the road could be cleared for real revolution.

Besides Patton, other contributors to The Black Woman wrestled directly with the Moynihan report, with the Black Liberationist "manhood" preoccupation that was restricting Black women's activism, and with the effects of capitalism on the Black community (Cade [Bambara] 1970a; Carey Bond and Perry 1970; Lincoln 1970; Lindsey 1970). Kay Lindsey's essay in The Black Woman echoed the idea that Black militants had been seduced by capitalist promises, and that the "Black middle class" were "pseudo-escapees into the mainstream" who had assumed "many of the institutional postures of the oppressor, including the so-called intact family" (1970:86). Lindsey argued that white establishment efforts to "encourage the acquisition of property among Blacks via Black Capitalism... would probably serve to further intensify the stranglehold on women as property" (1970:86-87).

And contributors also had concerns about Black Liberation's anti-birth control stance, following the stance first articulated by the Mount Vernon Group. Black Liberationist anti-birth control politics did not stop at rhetoric; in 1969, Black nationalists from the United Movement for Progress closed down a birth control clinic in Pittsburgh, which was subsequently reopened by community women (Lindsey 1970). Cade (Bambara) (1970c: 163-164) wrote of attending a workshop given by a Black Liberation group that degenerated into a diatribe against birth control. She described how "one tall, lean dude... castigated the Sisters to throw away the pill and hop to the mattresses and breed revolutionaries and mess up the man's genocidal program." One of the women present responded with a question about the "dude's" financial responsibility in this: "[W]hen's the last time you fed one of them brats you been breeding all over the city, you jive-ass so-and-so?"

The writings contained in The Black Woman represented a polyphonous response to the traditional gender ideology that Black Liberationists were espousing as revolutionary; in other places, Black feminists were agreeing that Black Liberation's sexism was rooted in their unquestioning adoption of middle-class values alien to the Black community. On the West Coast, in Seattle, Nina Harding, then a thirty-one-year-old Black Studies major at the University of Washington, a mother, and an employee of the Seattle Opportunities Industrialization Center, wrote a position paper entitled "The Interconnections Between the Black Struggle and the Woman Question," which she presented at the annual conference of the Seattle Radical Women in February 1970. In it, Harding also argued that Black Liberation, otherwise critical of capitalism, had accepted traditional ideas about women's roles, and she blamed these retrograde attitudes on unquestioning acceptance of the Muslims; but she was also critical of Black "bourgeois sisters and silent sisters," who hold to "WASP standards, be those standards interpreted by the Muslim or Nationalist advocates" (1970:4). Other Black feminists in other cities echoed the idea that Black Liberation was importing white middle-class values into the heart of the Black community (Holmes Norton 1970). When interviewed by a Los Angeles Times reporter in June of 1970, Margaret Wright, a member of the Los Angeles Black women's liberation group, declared it impossible for Black families to be shaped like white ones because of class domination:

“[T]he black man is saying he wants a family structure like the white man's. He's got to be head of the family and women have to be submissive and all that nonsense. Hell the white woman is already oppressed in that setup.” (1972:608)