Looking for Feminism: Racial Dynamics and Generational Investments in the Second Wave.(Critical essay)

IN AN IMPORTANT 1998 ESSAY, "Whose Feminism, Whose History?" Sherna Berger Gluck pointed to "the deep investment on the part of the participants in the early days of the women's liberation movement in preserving the primacy of our particular experience and analysis." In her view, the growing recognition of feminist activism by working-class women and women of color had not been sufficient to force reconfiguration of the received paradigm. As a result, she argued, the writing of this history "might best be left to the new generation of feminist scholars ..., a generation whose understanding of historical processes is not tied up with their own direct experience and the sense of 'ownership' that this seems to have engendered." (1) Examination of five recent works on this period, one by a veteran, four by somewhat younger-generation scholars, confirms, contravenes, and complicates Gluck's provocative assertion.

DREAMS OF INTEGRATION

In The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. Winifred Breines, writing as both a scholar and a veteran of 1960s and 1970s radical and socialist feminist activism, looks at interactions between black and white women in the civil rights movement; the universalit assumptions of white feminists; the racially divided socialist feminist milieu(s) of Boston-Cambridge during the seventies; and the eventual accomplishment of respectful, if tentative, coalition work in which white feminists learned to accept the leadership of black women activists on issues concerning the black community. Breines interrogates her position as an early participant to examine how "white nostalgia" for the dream of an integrated society and movement shaped both her initial research agenda and the consciousness of white feminists more generally.

Gluck's charge that first-generation scholars have "settled into complacency and not tackled the problems inherent in producing a morecomplicated, multilayered history" is challenged by Breines's self-critical analysis of the assumptions and contradictions that informed racial thought and practice among white socialist feminists (and by implication white feminists more generally). (2) This occurs on two levels in particular: one, a thoughtful characterization of the racial attitudes that characterized post-World War II liberalism; the second, a more specific examination of white feminist activism as exemplified by the Boston socialist feminist group Bread and Roses.

In the first of these, Breines portrays a version of the form of white racial consciousness that we know as the ideology of color blindness. Although color blindness is today most often associated with conservative opposition to affirmative action and multiculturalism, Breines rightly characterizes its 1950s and 1960s version as the product of post-World War II liberalism, an "idealism in which racial difference was almost expressly denied" (8) and in which the ability to overlook race was indeed esteemed as a moral/political accomplishment. A particularly telling detail is Breines's account of her early fascination with Edward Steichen's The Family of Man, which used photos of families from a multitude of societies, nationalities, and racial and ethnic groups at different stages in the life cycle, to express, in Steichen's words, '"the universal brotherhood of man"' and '"the essential oneness of mankind"' through its depiction of "the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life." "Color-blindness, our supposed sameness," Breines comments, "moved us; it certainly did me" (10).

For white activists and supporters, the civil rights movement seemed both to articulate and fulfill the dreams of a "universal, racially integrated sisterhood and brotherhood ... where, hand in hand, we would work to create a just world" (9). (3) But color blindness, which tended to see inequality in attitudinal terms, had complex implications for this generation of white activists and the movements they participated in. At the time, Breines notes,

 
  the early, idealistic "family of man" phase seems to have contained 
  the assumption that upholding universalist ideals, like integration, 
  made the one who upholds them into a newer sort of white person. ... 
  It made us different, we thought (11).