Feminism’s Problem With Race

In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argued that American women suffered from a malaise she called "the problem that had no name." Her critique of domestic ennui helped launch the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s, leading to many of the advances women now take for granted. But not everything has changed. So we asked women to answer this question: If you had to pinpoint today's problem that had no name, what would it be? Read the other responses here. [2]

I've never read The Feminine Mystique. Betty Friedan's articulation of "problem that has no name" was an influential snapshot of a particular problem in a particular point of time. But the feminism of the first and second wave has never been the feminism (or the womanism) of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. For example, take the question of whether to work. What some women struggled with as a point of politics, my foremothers had done simply as a matter of survival. Feminism framed the issues in a way that spoke to different women from all walks of life-then presented solutions that tended to favor women of a certain race and class.

I felt this familiar ache when I came to my own feminist understanding at an early age. Frustrated with everything from petty gender slights to larger, more sprawling issues, I was thrilled to find a movement that seemed made for me. Eating up books like Jennifer Baumguardner's and Amy Richard's Manifesta and reading Bust and discovering words and phrases like patriarchy and sexual assault filled me with hope. Finally, words to express what I had been feeling! But the luster of feminism soon started to fade. I read anthology after anthology without hearing from a single woman of color. I started to feel pushed out of conversations when I introduced complicating factors like race or class to feminist analysis. I began feeling a rift forming between myself and other feminists over these issues: the idea that I could speak on issues important to their communities, but they would never deign to return the favor. I started to feel like feminism wasn't for me after all.

This is not an uncommon feeling. Starting with (and probably before) Sojourner Truth's landmark 1851 "Ain't I A Woman" speech to the Combahee River Collective's 1986 statement condemning feminism for racist actions and a lack of understanding of the need for racial solidarity, many women of color-black women, in particular-dip deep into the well of feminism and find the water too tainted with racism and classism to drink.

Feeling alienated, I began dabbling on the outskirts of feminism. I stopped being concerned with this one word, and started truly looking. Where is there work toward true equality and not just equal-opportunity oppression? Where are our rights and our lived experiences being respected? Who is covering new ground, instead of having the same cyclical arguments about the same three issues?

I gravitated to hip-hop feminism, a movement started by the pioneer hip-hop feminist Joan Morgan. In her groundbreaking 1999 effort, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, Morgan captured much of the distaste I felt about mainstream feminism. Calling for "a feminism that fucks with the grays," Morgan was the first to speak to the complex nature of reconciling ideals with day-to-day life. Real life is messy, complicated, full of bargaining and negotiations and a constant need to re-evaluate our carefully considered stances on-well, just about everything. Ambiguity is a part of life, but is so often expelled from the hard stances that feminism supports. Through hip-hop feminism, I found essays that spoke directly to my experience, written by young urban women grappling with everything from misogyny in the lyrics we like to grind to on dance floors to perspectives on choice beyond the yes/no abortion debate to the idea of simultaneously fighting and reclaiming beauty standards in a world that devalues brown skin, kinky hair, and fuller figures.

I kept looking for more thinkers who take ideas from the feminist toolbox and forge them into new utensils that better suit their needs. Theists of all stripes are seeking ways to reconcile religious belief and feminism. Through the work of Lisa Facotra-Borchers, a questioning Catholic feminist, I was introduced to the concept of [3]kyriarchy [3]. Pioneered by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, kyriarchy illuminates the reality that all oppressed people are not necessarily working toward the same ends. Indeed, sometimes the power structures designed to benefit white heterosexual men are upheld by members of historically marginalized groups hoping one day to ascend to that throne. That power of that transformative idea is monumental. My friend Fatemeh Fakhraie introduced me to the concept of Muslimah feminism, the radical idea that Muslim women can speak on their own behalf, without the intervention of western do-gooders or Muslim men. On her blog, Muslimah Media Watch [4], she is eloquent about facing condescension in the feminist community for daring to claim the term feminist while practicing Islam. To my mind, transnational feminism is of particular interest at a moment when women across the globe identify their needs so differently. My friend Tanglad (of the blog, Tanglad) [5] showed me how her feminism is critical of a capitalist system that so often leaves Filipina women trading their long hours of labor so that others can indulge their desire for cheap T-shirts.

Perhaps the entire idea of a single, unified movement is outdated.

Perhaps it never made sense in the first place to try to corral the unique needs of the majority of the world into one neatly defined little box as our lives spilled over the sides.

Even as we women have spilled out of the feminist box, the concepts and the ideas of feminism have done the same thing, seeping into a wider global consciousness, starting to reflect a more complex reality. There have always been women who have rebelled, who refused to be colonized, who wished to remain as they are. Organized feminism set the ball rolling. Perhaps it is time to see where the ball goes on its own. Like happiness, like beauty, like love, perhaps feminism has become a concept that must be defined by each individual.

More than anything, more than any book in the canon or slogan on a T-shirt, modern feminism is a state of mind.