Black Panther Women in the Third World

Revolutionary African American women have been infamous for their loyalty to anti-racism, but criticized for their lack of engagement in the so-called “second-wave” feminism. Recent studies on their activism tend to uncover the women’s roles within the United States to compete with white mainstream feminist history; however, black women’s gender issues require interlocking inquiries with race in transnational contexts of the Cold War era.

My paper examines how African American women’s movements closely related to the “third world,” and how their encounters with third world women constructed black transnational feminism from the late 1960s to mid 1970s. Women in the Black Panther Party (BPP) were particularly associated with anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist activism in countries like Vietnam. Influenced by Vietnamese women in combat, often pictured holding a gun and a baby, BPP women implemented the image of global revolutionary women, wearing Afro hairdos and leather jackets—the typical uniform of the BPP—and holding shotguns in public. Beyond their fashion and imagery, many women in the BPP were also involved in women’s movements both in the United States and in third world countries. BPP member and secretary Kathleen Neal Cleaver in particular engaged in third world women’s organizations like the Vietnamese and North Korean Women’s Union, during her exile from the U.S. between 1969 and 1975. She later continued to work with women in newly-emerging third world movements in the United States as well.

The study of the convergence of revolutionary women from the United States with those from the third world will provide new perspectives on black women’s movements both for race and gender as a cultural exchange. Kathleen Cleaver’s activism in the Intersectional Section of the BPP will be extremely crucial to understand how African American women transformed their third worldism into race and gender politics in political movements.