Second Wave Feminism took place roughly between the famous 1968 Miss America Pageant protest
and the early 1980s. But long before the myth of bra-burning on the Atlantic City boardwalk
was born, African-American women were awakening to the civil rights movement which would eventually
inspire second-wave feminism.
In 1944, Rosa Parks was busy with the NAACP, investigating and initiating community campaigns
to protest the systematic rape of black women by white men in the Jim Crow South. That was
11 years before she would refuse to move to the back of the Montgomery, Alabama bus not
because she was tired but because she’d been specially trained to start a revolution.
When progressive college students began dedicating themselves to civil rights, Ella Baker helped
the iconic Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee get on its feet in 1960. An activist
since her own college days, Baker impressed upon the major civil rights organizations
a model of participatory democracy, whose hallmark grassroots organizing, decentralized
leadership, consciousness raising female Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members
would then take with them to the nascent second wave, along with the Ella Baker ethos that
would become a motto of the movement: the personal is political. And Ella B. also rocked
some major shades. Even more major was 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act in
July and the testimony of Fannie Lou Hamer before the Democratic National Convention.
In her historic speech, Hamer linked the importance of voting rights and reproductive rights for
black women in her home state of Mississippi, where many including herself were forcibly
sterilized and the state legislature at that time was trying to legalize sterilization
in exchange for welfare benefits. But this wasn’t just an issue in Mississippi; since
the turn of the century, thousands of women of color across the United States underwent
tubal ligation without prior consent. That same year, activist, lawyer and all-around
badass Pauli Murray coined the term “Jane Crow,” which encompassed the dual prejudice
women of color faced which became the legal framework to challenge the Not-So-Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission’s 1965 determination that sex discrimination in the workplace is
a-OK. And around that time, Murray had another great idea thinking what if there were an
NAACP-type organization that advocated specifically for women? She mentioned this to Betty Friedan,
and in 1966 the National Organization for Women was born. The raddest Pauli Murray fact
of all? She’s an Episcopal saint. But as our often whitewashed memory of second-wave
feminism reiterates, few women of color felt at home among the largely white, middle class
National Organization for Women membership. So in the late 1960s and early 1970s they
began forming their own organizations such as the Chicana Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, Asian
Sisters and Third World Women's Alliance. Unlike many white-led feminist organizations
at the time, multiculturalism and socioeconomic diversity were integral to their grassroots
organizing, focusing on shared injustices and issues such as sterilization, infant mortality,
housing and welfare rights, low-wage work, drug addiction and negative portrayals in
the media. Meanwhile feminism was making inroads all the way to Washington. Lawyer turned activist
Flo Kennedy and her signature cowboy hats positioned feminism as not just a thought
exercise but a bona fide political movement by establishing the Feminist Party in 1971.
The following year with it’s support America’s first black congresswoman Shirley Chisholm
became America’s first black presidential candidate on a major party ticket. Spicy Ol’
Flo was also known for dropping zingers in her day, including one of her most famous:
if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Hi-OHHHH! And speaking of
abortion, the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision raises important distinctions of
how many black women interpreted reproductive freedom. While white feminists saw it as a
chance to decentralize motherhood and domesticity in women’s lives, women of color historically
had to fight for the very right to bear and raise their own children with family culturally
functioning as welcome safe havens. For that reason housing and rape crisis advocate since
the 1970s, Loretta Ross developed the more inclusive concept of reproductive justice.
Black feminist thought, criticism and writing also flourished during the 1970s and early
80s from the likes of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Angela Davis and so many
others. And as second-wave feminism came to a close, Alice Walker ushered womanism into
our intersectional lexicon in 1983 to specifically describe feminists of color. Or as Walker
put it "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”