Writing the Way to Feminism

Abstract

Recent works indicate that minority feminist organizing was much more widespread, and began much earlier, than the traditional historiographies have credited, yet these new developments have not overturned an understanding of the 1980s as the decade of multiracial feminist organizing. If sustained and multifaceted minority feminist activism was occurring in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, is a characterization of the 1980s as the era of multiracial feminism still accurate? I employ a comparative historical and content analysis of writings from the late 1960s through the 1980s to determine what, if any, important distinctions occurred between those two time periods. I find that writing was an important mechanism for communication and debate in the 1970s and the 1980s, but there were significant differences in terms of the locations in which the writing occurred and, by extension, the source of editorial control over said writing. The issue of racial solidarity dominated the race-movement and white-feminist-controlled spaces of many 1970s publications, and thus limited the conversation, primarily because the locations drove audience and content, restricting coverage to those themes deemed relevant to a nonminority feminist audience. In contrast, the hallmark of autonomous women of color’s writings of the 1970s and 1980s was the freedom associated with independently controlled publishing spaces that provided more physical space for debate, as well as the autonomy to engage those themes deemed most relevant to them. It was this autonomy, combined with political changes that allowed for a concentrated focus on feminist alliances, that merits a designation of the 1980s as the decade of multiracial feminism.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.