Different Wavelengths

Studies of the Contemporary Women's Movement

Jo Reger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317721482
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The original essays in this collection ground the shifting terrain of feminism in the 21st century. The contributors define and examine the complexity of the Third Wave by answering questions like: how appropriate is a "third wave" label for contemporary feminism; are the agendas of contemporary feminism and the "second wave" really all that different; does the wave metaphor accurately describe the difference between contemporary feminists and their predecessors; how do women of color fit into this notion of contemporary feminism; and what are the future directions of the feminist movement?

Part I

Who is Third Wave? Issues of Diversity

1

STRONGBLACKWOMEN AND BLACK FEMINISM: A NEXT GENERATION?

Kimberly Springer

The history of black feminist activism is one that has been, traditionally, obscured in histories of the women’s movement, as well as in feminist theory. In reality, there was no shortage of black women writing about their gender and race concerns in a range of theoretical traditions from liberal to Marxist and defining their own theoretical position rooted in black women’s experiences in the public and private realms of U.S. society. Additionally, scholars began to insert narratives of black women’s gender activism in the historical records of the civil rights and women’s liberation movements from the 1980s into the early twenty-first century.

Beneficiaries of this second look at black women’s activism were not only the women themselves, who deserved the long overdue recognition of dramatically shifting how we discuss intersecting identities, but also the next generation of potential black feminists. Specifically, those young black women, mostly college educated, who are part of the Generation X cohort, and were nurtured in a cultural milieu that included the historical legacies of Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Ella Baker, and a host of other black women activists/scholars/thinkers.¹

At the same time, we cannot underestimate the reticence with which some young black women approach the black feminist label. Arguments against black feminism are most definitely cultural hangovers that have haunted black women concerned with sexism in black communities for generations: accusations of “acting white” by engaging with feminism; claims that feminism detracts from the black struggle; homophobia; and often a lack of understanding of the goals of feminism as a political ideology.

Black feminists who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s continue to wrestle with gender dilemmas and strive to impart knowledge about the struggle for racial and gender justice.² Yet, younger black women are also joining the dialogue through their activism, music, and writing. This chapter asks three central questions about contemporary young black women’s views on gender and race: Is there a third wave black feminist politic? What issues are contemporary young black feminists prioritizing? How do these young women contextualize their experiences and their politics?

I approach these questions of a third wave black feminism through writing because of literacy’s important place in social change movements, as well as a legacy of literacy’s power for African-American women’s self-definition. Denied literacy as enslaved Africans, sometimes educated in secrecy but at great risk, African Americans have found ways to communicate a message of struggle and liberation through oral and written traditions. As demonstrated in emancipation narratives such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, African-American women have used their literacy as a weapon against racial and gender oppression as exacted by white supremacy since the early presence of African Americans in the United States.³ Moreover, African-American women used that literacy to take to task intracommunity responsibilities, calling upon men and women to define themselves as African and American. Late eighteenth-century writings offer a compelling picture of African-American women’s grievances as blacks and women, while demanding full inclusion in decisions impacting their communities, their families, and their personal integrity. Those imperatives remain apparent in the writing of contemporary generations of black feminists.

Three contemporary texts fall under the rubric of young black feminist writing: Lisa Jones’s collection of essays Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, and Hair; Joan Morgan’s essays, released in 1999, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist (hereafter known as Chickenheads); and Veronica Chambers’s 1996 memoir Mama’s Girl.⁴ These texts stand out as they speak explicitly from or about young black feminist perspectives in the 1990s. Jones’s and Morgan’s essays effectively meld the third wave penchant for personal narrative with second wave theoretical underpinning, creating a case for interrogating the politics of style (i.e., lifestyle) and the style of politics (i.e., political issues). While second wave feminists, particularly cultural feminists, were accused, rightly or wrongly, of attending too much to feminism as lifestyle, Morgan and Jones attend effectively to popular culture, an increasingly influential concern among next generation feminists.

In other words, young black feminists might be reacting to stereotypes about feminism as reducible to whether one shaves one’s legs when, in fact, feminism is about much deeper, critical political issues. These three texts have much to contribute to academic pursuits concerned with examining the daily functioning of interlocking systems of oppression. Moreover, as texts that examine popular culture, they convey valuable, transferable messages for activists working around gender, race, and class in U.S. black communities. With a politics of style, young black feminists address both politics and style, which can be interpreted as the impact of writers firmly embedded in the hip-hop generation as a movement of style and politics.

Young black feminists elaborate on three central themes that create a unique and updated position for black feminism in the third wave. The first to emerge is young black women’s relationship to our personal and political histories. This history includes our relationships to past social movements and to our biological and political foremothers. The next theme is a persistent one in black women’s writing: relationship to self. Morgan, Chambers, and Jones each tackle the myth of the “Strong Black Woman” and what it means for how we relate to our mothers, other black women, and ourselves. Finally, the authors write about black women’s relationships to black men as biological brothers, brothers in the political sense, and fathers.

Young, contemporary black women continue creating feminist analyses of black life, but they are not necessarily claiming the label of third wave. Their reasons, however, are different from those of women who fear feminism as an ideology. These women share their life stories in the public forum as a way of asserting a contemporary black female identity that is mindful of historical context and community imperatives. Recuperation of the self in a racist and sexist society is a political enterprise and a black feminist one that deprioritizes generational differences in the interest of historical, activist continuity.

TENDING OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS

What is the relationship between black feminists of differing generations?⁵ Does a generational rift exist between them? One aspect of the generational tensions between feminists in general is the frustration older feminists feel at watching younger women reinvent the wheels of social change. Black feminist cultural critic Michele Wallace, in retrospect, recognized the irritation of her mother and other women of her mother’s generation. In her essay “To Hell and Back,” Wallace writes of the late 1960s:

My thesis had been that I and my generation were reinventing youth, danger, sex, love, blackness, and fun. But there had always been just beneath the surface a persistent countermelody, … what I might also call my mother’s line, a deep suspicion that I was reinventing nothing, but rather making a fool of myself in precisely the manner that untold generations of young women before me had done.⁶

Other than this autobiographical insight by Wallace, few sources speak of generational conflicts or distinctions between black feminists.⁷

As beneficiaries of social movements that drastically altered the sociopolitical landscape of racial and sexual politics, Jones, Morgan, and Chambers each addresses the question of generation. They give credit to the civil rights, women’s, and black nationalist movements for the opportunities these movements gave us to attain places of privilege in the workplace and institutions of higher education. Yet, they also recognize the complacency that such awe-inspiring sheroes and heroes inspired in Generation X. Chambers recalls, as a child, watching documentaries about black history. She and her brother would boast of how they would have resisted racist oppression had they lived in those times, but the reprimanding look on her mother’s face told her that, in reality, “we had no idea what we would or wouldn’t have done.” Chambers continues, “Deep down inside, I wondered. As bad as those times were, I wished sometimes that there was some sort of protest or something that I could get involved with.”⁸ Such melancholy nostalgia reflects a falsely held belief that all of the meaningful struggles are over, that all of the battles have been won. Or, alternately, for a generation increasingly disenfranchised by the potential of American politics, the belief that change is impossible.

Chambers lived with both parents until age ten when her father left the family. At the time of Chambers’s reminiscence, her parents provided the basics for her and her brother, and the fact that they had always lived in a house with a yard is a significant marker of the class security she felt as a child. Chambers’s parents instituted a “Black History Day” in their home before Black History Month came into existence, so their daughter had an early sense of the sacrifices they made, particularly her mother, but felt none of those barriers herself. Chambers’s memories of contemplating what she would have done during the height of the civil rights movement, ultimately, is the luxury of a generation that benefited from that particular struggle.

Morgan takes a less fanciful approach and considers the lulling effect on Generation X of successful social movements, in terms of civil rights and women’s liberation movement gains. In the introduction to her book, entitled Dress Up, Morgan recalls being jealous of her mother’s generation, not because they had it easy but because of the burgeoning contemporary women’s movement and the dissemination of ideas about independence and self-fulfillment. Her mother’s generation also had the cultural explosion of black women’s literature to affirm their existence and the circumstances of “being black, female and surviving.”⁹ Morgan was ten years old when Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was not enuf premiered in New York City. When her mother refused to take her, a young Joan tried every trick in her arsenal—from whining, to singing “the Five Stairsteps’ ‘O-o-h child things are going to get easier’ over and over again—attitudinal and loud—until I was two seconds shy of an ass whooping.”¹⁰ It was only with coming into her own awareness of race and gender that Morgan understood that “the play held crucial parts of her [mother] —parts she needed to share with her husband and not her ten-year-old daughter.”¹¹

When she attends the twentieth anniversary run of for colored girls in Manhattan, Morgan hopes that it will reveal secrets of black womanhood that she thought her mother withheld. This was not the case. She realized, “As a child of the post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, post-soul hip-hop generation my struggle songs consisted of the same notes but they were infused with distinctly different rhythms.”¹² In realizing that she was waiting for someone to write a version of for colored girls for her generation, Morgan calls to task her own complacency, as well as that of her generation. She cautions, “Relying on older heads to redefine the struggle to encompass our generation’s issues is not only lazy but dangerous. Consider our foremothers’ contributions a bad-ass bolt of cloth. We’ve got to fashion the gear to our own liking.”¹³ Linking generational style and politics, Morgan calls upon the hip-hop generation to create a language and culture that signifies more than a lifestyle but also a political stance worthy of definition. Far from dismissing the achievements of past generations, Morgan acknowledges previous generations of women who, whether they identified as feminist or not, made possible Morgan’s self-described position as a hip-hop feminist.

Describing herself as a descendant of civil rights, feminism, and soul music does not imply that, as a society, we are finished with the struggle for civil or women’s rights. The popular press’s use of the term postfeminist implies a uniquely liberated, sexy, young woman who believes feminism is dead or all the battles have been won. Morgan uses the prefix post- to signal the end of a particular era of tactics and action. She in no way indicates that the goals or hopes of those movements were fulfilled or are no longer relevant to current generations. She does openly recognize a position as “the daughters of feminist privilege.”¹⁴ The “we” means college-educated, middle-class black girls who believe that there is nothing we cannot achieve because we are women, though sexism and racism might fight us every step of the way. Morgan attempts to craft a collective identity for a new generation of thinkers and organizers. This is a unifying move meant to reach out to women like Chambers who long for significant struggles like those of past eras, as well as those who feel as though the movements of the 1960s were failures due to conservative backlash, without taking into account our own lack of political vigilance.

Lisa Jones issues a similar call to action for the post–civil rights, postfeminist generation. Though the subtitle of her book only mentions race, sex, and hair, she is also class conscious, either explicitly or implicitly, in the forty-four essays that make up ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Who is Third Wave? Issues of Diversity
• Part II Mothers and Daughters? Relations between the Second and Third Waves
• Part III What Brings Change? Tactics of the Third Wave
• Part IV Into The Future: Implications of a Third Wave
• Different Wavelengths: A Bibliography
• Contributor Biographies
• Different Wavelengths: Index