Why "fun feminism" should be consigned to the rubbish bin

[MicaelS]

185. Here's a black woman speaking about First and Second Wave Feminism...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/sophia33/obama-ferraro-race-flap-r_n_91047_11933183.html

It amplifies what you stated.

Full post at link.

What Geraldine Ferraro did this week was no different than what too many white feminists have done to people of color for centuries in this country. When Ida B. Wells, a black feminist who also fought against lynching in the south, went to Alice Paul excited about joining the suffrage movement, Paul told Wells that her (Wells) participation in the suffrage movement would muddy the waters for women to get the right to vote. Essentially, because blacks did not have the right to vote, the white feminists did not want the black feminists to join with them because it would raise the issue of ALL blacks having the right to vote. One only need to read the writings of Paula Giddings and bell hooks or the essays of Angela Davis or Alice Walker to see how white women in the women's rights movement all but ignored the issues faced by women of color.

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement - it was written as if these women [the poor and women of color] did not exist. Friedan's famous phrase, "the problem that has no name," often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women - housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with the children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating, "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house." That "more" she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak to the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, then to be a leisure class housewife.

She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated, white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home...

Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure class white house-wives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing political concerns of the masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc.