African American Women and Feminism in the 1960s

Throughout the 1960s, a growing number of African American women including Pauli Murray, Dorothy Height, Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Jeanne Noble, and Shirley Chisholm made their way into the national debates on civil rights and increasingly on women’s rights as well.  Distinctly positioned, these women of color married a politics of race that was ever-mindful of the historic oppression African Americans had experienced throughout U.S. history, with a consummate belief in women’s human rights.  They did so in a variety of arenas including liberal political establishments like the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, President Johnson’s War on Poverty Job Corps program, and the U.S. Congress; and they also did so in pressure groups like the National Organization for Women, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, and the National Women’s Political Caucus. 

Often overlooked as an integral part of the “the second wave,” these women consistently raised concerns about the distinct challenges women of color faced in the labor force, in politics, in the media, and in their communities.  Moreover they actively proposed solutions that were broad-based and which, if fully implemented, could have created a radically different society, free of deep-seated patriarchy and racism. Their accomplishments and the limits of their success suggest the possibilities but also the substantial challenges of creating truly inclusive progressive social change.   Nonetheless, they put politicians on notice, challenged the media, and compelled white feminists to think about gendered discrimination in much more complex ways.

This paper argues that the politics of inclusion that women like Murray, Hedgeman, and Chisholm engaged in was a vital part of the 1960s women’s movement and it helped create the terms for and organizational lineage from which self-defined “third-wavers” could draw from in the 1980s through the present.