Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist organization active in the 1970s that emphasized the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. They are best known for their influential Combahee River Collective Statement, which articulated the need for a radical, inclusive feminist politics that addressed the unique experiences of Black women. Their work laid the foundation for contemporary intersectional feminist theory and activism.
6 Key excerpts on "Combahee River Collective"
eBook - ePubReimagining Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Survival Beyond 2021
- Gary B. Crosby, Khalid A. White, Marcus A. Chanay, Adriel Hilton, Gary B. Crosby, Khalid A. White, Marcus A. Chanay, Adriel A. Hilton(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Emerald Publishing Limited(Publisher)
...The members of the Collective were conscious Black women with a shared belief about their own inherent value and the need for their liberation to be prioritized, not overshadowed by the liberation efforts of others. The Combahee River Collective believed its members must focus on their identities as Black women in order to effectively engage in identity politics. Although Black feminism was developed in response to the exclusion of Black women from the antiracist liberation movements of Black men and antisexist efforts of white women, the Combahee River Collective believed that it was not possible to separate race and class oppression from sex oppression due to the pervasiveness of patriarchy (Combahee River Collective, 1995). They fought in solidarity alongside Black men against racism for many years, but also recognized that it was Black men with whom Black women must struggle, often relentlessly, for freedom from sexism. The Combahee River Collective deliberately identified the problematic relationship between Black feminist politics and the movements for Black liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, including the role of those movements in failing to specifically focus on Black women's oppression and identity politics. The Combahee River Collective directly addressed the extreme pain that Black women often endured relative to their identities within our white supremacist heterosexual patriarchal society prior to becoming more conscious with regard to concepts such as feminism, patriarchy, capitalism, sexual politics, and several others. Despite the pervasiveness of racism and racial politics in the lives of Black women, Black women still are not permitted to deeply examine and analyze their experiences or to process their developing consciousness to build life changing politics that will end their oppression...
eBook - ePubAvailable Means
An Anthology Of Women'S Rhetoric(s)
- Joy Ritchie, Kate Ronald(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- University of Pittsburgh Press(Publisher)
...Combahee River Collective 1977 “We examined our own lives and found that everything out there was kicking our behinds—race, class, sex, and homophobia” (Home Girls xxxiv). Barbara Smith's words describe the desperate circumstances of many black women in 1977. As black lesbian feminists active in the Combahee River Collective, Barbara Smith, her twin sister, Beverly, and Demita Frazier drafted the “Combahee River Collective Statement” in 1977. First published in Zillah Eisenstein's collection, Capitalist Patriarchy: The Case for Social Feminism, the statement motivated black feminists to work against their multilayered oppression and challenged white feminists to acknowledge their exclusion of women of color and working-class women in the feminist movement. As a grassroots organization formed in conjunction with New York's National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), the Combahee River Collective worked for six years in Boston. They borrowed their name from Harriet Tubman's organized action during the Civil War that freed over 750 slaves. It was an appropriate name for their 1970s organization that sought to raise consciousness among black women. Among other issues, the Collective addressed the racism of white feminists in the women's movement—the racism that forced many black women to reject feminism altogether. The Combahee River Collective called the feminism they fought for “Black feminism,” which Barbara Smith says builds on history: “It is used to characterize Black women's tradition of courage, independence, and pragmatism under the brutal conditions of slavery and institutionalized racism” (Mankiller et al. 202). The Combahee River Collective also organized retreats for black feminists and challenged homophobia, sexual harassment, and classism in the black community. Perhaps the most revolutionary and influential premise of the “Combahee River Collective Statement” is that the oppression of black women is multilayered and simultaneous...
eBook - ePubProtest Nation
Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism
- Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, John McMillian(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- The New Press(Publisher)
...27. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) The “Combahee River Collective Statement” is an important articulation of black feminist theory and practice. (The Collective gained its name from a South Carolina river where abolitionist Harriet Tubman helped free 750 slaves during the Civil War.) It was formed in Boston in 1974 in an effort to raise the consciousness of African-American women, especially around such issues as sexual harassment, classism, and heterosexism. It lasted until 1980. Although the following manifesto represented the collective thinking of several leading black feminists, it was primarily written by Barbara Smith (1946–) a pioneering literary critic and editor. According to one historian, it was “crucial to building the [black feminist movement] in the 1970s,” and it continues to carry currency among black feminists today. SOURCE: The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties. Foreword by Barbara Smith. Latham, NY: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1986. SELECTED READINGS: bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984). Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). Barbara Smith, Toward a Black Feminist Criticism (1977). … What We Believe Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression...
eBook - ePubAll Our Trials
Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence
- Emily L Thuma(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- University of Illinois Press(Publisher)
...As Barbara [Smith] has always said, they are intent upon killing us and ours is a voice of clarity in the patriarchal wilderness.” 26 By the end of the year, roughly 30,000 copies of the pamphlet had been distributed, and specific portions republished in a range of publications including Aegis, Radical America, and the 1981 anthology Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence. Combahee River Collective pamphlet. Courtesy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. An Intersectional Coalition for Women’s Safety Over its nearly two-year lifespan, the Coalition for Women’s Safety (CWS) promoted cooperative interchange in a city in which activists typically found it “very hard to really cross neighborhoods.” 27 The initial meetings took place at Women, Inc., a community-based organization in Dorchester that provided substance addiction treatment and housing to poor women. 28 Representatives of roughly twenty different groups attended, including projects that grew expressly out of the murder crisis, particularly the Dorchester Green Light Program and Crisis; service organizations such as Women, Inc., Community Programs Against Sexual Assault (CPASA), and the Roxbury Multi-Service Center; and multi-issue social justice organizations such as the Dorchester Youth Alliance, Jamaica Plain City Life, and Combahee River Collective. In Jamaica Plain, a group of feminist activists formed a CWS caucus that sent a liaison to the biweekly coalition meetings. These groups and individuals coalesced around a “bottom line commitment to work towards ending violence against women in our neighborhoods.” 29 Those who regularly attended CWS meetings and coordinated work on behalf of its organizational and individual members comprised a diverse array of seasoned community activists—black, Latina, and white women, lesbian and straight, feminist and nonfeminist, low-income, working-class, and middle-class...
eBook - ePub- C. Scott Dixon, Beat Kümin, C. Scott Dixon, Beat Kümin(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...with an introduction by Amy Louise Eriksson. London: Routledge. Combahee River Collective (1983). The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). In: Barbara Smith ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 264–75. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, 139–166. Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Charles Inglis eds. (1995). Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. New York: New Press. Crowston, Clare Haru (2013). Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Davis, Natalie (1975/76). Women’s History in Transition: the European Case. Feminist Studies 3.Winter, 83–103. Dennison, Tracy and Ogilvie, Sheilagh (2014). Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth? Journal of Economic History 74.3, 651‒93. Dursteler, Eric R. (2012). Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eng, David L., Halberstam, Judith and Esteban Munoz, Jose (2005). What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now? Social Text 84.85 (October), 1–17. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books. Feerick, Jean E. (2010). Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ferguson, Margaret, Quilligan, Maureen and Vickers, Nancy eds. (1986). Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Findlen, Paula ed. (2013). Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800. London: Routledge. Focal Point: Confessionalization and Social Discipline in France, Italy, and Spain. (2003). With articles by James R...
eBook - ePub- Z. Isoke(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...2 F RAMING B LACK W OMEN’S R ESISTANCE: A B LACK F EMINIST I NTERSECTIONAL A PPROACH For three hundred and more years they have had ‘time,’ and now it is time for them to listen. We have been listening year after year to them, and what have we got? We are not even allowed to think for ourselves. They tell us, ‘I know what is best for you,’ but they don’t know what is best for us! It is time to let them know what they owe us, and they owe us a great deal. Fannie Lou Hamer (1965) The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression and see as our particular task the development of an integrated analysis and practices based upon the fact that these major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face. Combahee River Collective (1979) Politics is a commitment to live differently in the present, to think and act against the grain of oppression. Maria Lugones (2003) Can I Get a Window Seat? Erykah Badu (2009) Thinking about black women’s politics mandates that we think about how black women have resisted structural intersectionality. It also requires that we examine their lives using an intersectional analytical framework that privileges the subjective, representational, institutional, and geographic contexts through which their politics emerge. In this book, structural intersectionality refers to the interlocking systems of social violence that circumscribe black people’s lives. These include, but are not limited to, racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, neoliberalism, and entrenched poverty...
