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Intersectionality and British Feminism in the 70s and 80s

The theory of intersectionality was unheard of and unused by black British feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, as the term was coined and first used by American feminist and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It was created to give name to “the fact that many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice”.[1] Crenshaw met a woman called Emma DeGraffenreid, and it is her story that inspired Crenshaw to put a name to the multiple discriminations suffered through by black women as when there is “no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem, and when you can’t see a problem, you pretty much can’t solve it”.[2] DeGraffenreid was not hired by a motor company simply because she was a black women, and yet her case was dismissed because the company argued that they weren’t racist or sexist; they hired black men to do maintenance jobs, and white women in secretarial positions.[3] The court failed to acknowledge the double discrimination DeGraffenreid was facing, and thus the problem was ignored. Such discrimination was faced by all black women, but intersectionality did not just cover the oppression of gender; it focused on the overlapping oppressions of race, sexuality, class, age and even disability. Even though the term ‘intersectionality’ was not used by black British feminists at the time, the work they did in the 1970s and 1980s was at the root of the understanding of the theory, and they helped bring to light these multiple layers of injustice and persecution they suffered and continue to endure.

Black feminist activism was born out of the second-wave feminist movement that began in the late 1960s, which was very much white dominated, and this continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Thomlinson states that the “concerns of white feminists did not understand how racism profoundly structured the lives of black women”[4], and the plights of women of colour were practically ignored in the fight for gender equality. It was believed that issues of race would be solved for black women when all women gained equality, but also white women in the Women’s Liberation Movement were “reluctant to see themselves in the situation of being oppressors, as they feel that this will be at the expense of concentrating upon being oppressed”.[5] Furthermore, white feminists “understood black women through outdated paradigms of feminist internationalism and/or Marxist imperialism, which in turn placed black women on the periphery of what was largely understood to be a national feminist movement”.[6] Black women had the double burden of being heavily recruited into jobs which were low paid and menial, whilst also having to be domestic and look after their homes and family, yet white “wives and mothers were granted entry into paid work only so long as this did not harm the family”.[7] This shows the intersectional discrimination black women faced; black families were not deemed as important as white families by both society and the state, and “black women were seen to fail as mothers precisely because of their position as workers”.[8] 

Despite the fact that there were no strict laws of segregation in Britain as there were in America at the time, black migrants were “relegated to neighbourhoods on the edge of London that were suffering from extreme urban decay”[9] such as Brixton and Notting Hill. Furthermore, parliament introduced the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962, which restricted immigrants from coming into Britain and essentially branded black people as “a social problem”.[10] Fascist organisations were also beginning to grow in Britain throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including the British Union of Fascists, the British National Party and the League of Empire Loyalists. As racial tensions rose in Britain in the 1960s, and with the influence of black American activists like Angela Davis and Malcolm X, the Black Panther Movement was established in 1968 by Althea Jones-Lecointe and others in Britain.

Angela Davis Angela Davis

Women like Olive Morris and Stella Dadzie began to join and help the fight against racism. They found “a language of liberation in revolutionary texts”[11] they were exposed to within the movement, like the works of American activist Angela Davis, who argued that “both sexism and racism are deeply rooted in class oppression, and that neither can be eradicated without destroying the dominant patriarchal economic system”.[12] Many parallels can be drawn between the Black Panther Movements in America and Britain as they shared the same symbols and ideologies; however, due to differing gun control laws in each country, it was “difficult for the British Panthers to wage a movement based on armed self-defence”.[13] Rising racial tensions, alongside the influence of black American activists, urged young British activists to “rely on [their] own resources to meet [their] social needs”[14], and so young black activists would meet in record shops like Desmond’s in Brixton, and The Mangrove in Notting Hill, which became centres for “politicised leisure culture”.[15] However, “once the London police discovered that black teens were using such venues as sites of cultural-political resistance […] they intervened, often violently”.[16] The Mangrove restaurant was raided repeatedly by the police, with the excuse that they believed there were drugs on the premises, but this was just a cover-up of the fact that inherent bigotry and racism led to the breaking up of such black activist activities. As a response to these raids, a small protest of only 150 was organised in 1970, to which the police responded with 200 officers on the scene. This resulted in altercations between protesters and police, where nine were arrested and charged with assault, including Althea Jones-Lecointe.[17] This case shows the extent to which women were involved in activist movements, as Lecointe in her closing speech in court raised awareness to black persecution suffered at the hands of the police. 

Further cases include a serious altercation outside of Desmond’s record store in Brixton, where Olive Morris was horrifically beaten by police and subjected to sexual humiliation, as “in their eyes, black women could make no claims to femininity and thus did not deserve the type of protection that white women were afforded”.[18] This perfectly represents intersectional discrimination women like Olive Morris faced; her rights as a human were abused because she was black and a woman. It soon became obvious that the Black Panther Movement did not give black women the platform they needed to express and share their multiple oppressions; they suffered in the Black Panther Movement just as they did in the Women’s Liberation Movement. Black women often found it difficult getting their voices heard; women’s issues were demoted behind the ongoing issue of tackling racism, as it was believed that black women’s situations would improve when racism was no longer an issue.[19] Black women’s activism was, therefore, in response to the “failure of the police to offer [them] ‘impartial’ protection”[20], but also to intersectional discrimination they faced from both the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Black Panther Movement – despite being both black and a woman, their needs were pushed to the bottom of the barrel. Nevertheless, and despite tensions between men and women in the Black Panther Movement “black women activists were usually more willing to work with men from their communities than white feminists were with (white) men in the radical left community”.[21]

Thus, activists like Olive Morris, as well as other women from the Black Panther Movement, were urged to create “their own black feminist organisations to address issues that affected girls and women of colour”[22], as they had no representation elsewhere. These women were not the first to start black feminist organisations; they already existed in London, but only on a small scale; for example, the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Southhall Black Sisters, who worked in opposition to domestic “violence against women in their community”.[23] Black feminists in the 1970s advanced intersectional understandings of gender during the 1970s and 1980s as they increased the number of organisations fighting for black women not only in London but all over Britain, for example in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and Coventry.[24] The Liverpool Black Sisters organisation was established in the early 1970s, and its primary concerns included the lack of childcare available to black women at work, racial discrimination and deportations, for which it linked with the Immigrant Advice Unit.[25] This group had an intersectional approach to discrimination and is still active to this day. One of the more famous groups was the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD) which was cofounded by Olive Morris and Stella Dadzie in 1978, as they “sought to bring together black women from a number of different backgrounds and political perspectives in Britain”.[26] The OWAAD was different to other black feminist organisations, as it allowed black women all over Britain to “meet with each other, share ideas and give help and support to what each were doing”.[27] The organisation also included women of Asian descent, as “the term ‘black’ was used politically by activists during this period to include all those who were colonised […] contingent on the shared experiences of Afro-Caribbean, African and Asian immigrants”.[28] The OWAAD was a highly significant group in the fight to advance intersectional understandings of gender in Britain, as not only did it inspire women to “form Black Women’s groups in their own communities”[29], but it fought for women that were suffering through experiences deemed not as important by the Women’s Liberation Movement and the Black Panther Movement. Along with the Brixton Black Women’s Group, they protested over offensive and intrusive practices on Asian women, who were subjected to virginity tests upon arrival in Britain to test their marital claims.[30] Furthermore, they “gave support to women on strike, […] women involved in education battles against sin-bins and expulsions, women fighting the Sus laws and those facing deportation”[31], which were all issues specific to black and Asian women in Britain. A major campaign was also launched to stop “racist experimentation with the contraception Depo-Provera and forced sterilisations”[32], where racist doctors would essentially use black women as lab rats for the injection, despite it not being very well tested, as they did not care about the long-term effects it could have on their fertility.

Women in organisations like the OWAAD and Brixton Black Women’s Group stayed connected by newsletters and periodicals like FOWAAD and Speak Out, which were “focused on campaigns and an indictment of the racism of the British state, rather than discussions about the politics of the personal and patriarchy”.[33] Articles placed a large focus on Marxist frameworks, and “this economically determinist emphasis on the class roots of black women’s oppression demonstrates the importance of distinguishing between contemporary black feminism’s framing of intersectionality and earlier articulations of black feminist theory”.[34] This Marxist theory involved criticising black women in labour; how they were underpaid by employers, the first to be let go from positions, and were essentially exploited by the capitalist system under which they were employed. Despite not framing these issues in terms of the oppressive nature of intersectionality, “the linking of race, class and gender does foreshadow intersectionality in important ways, and suggests that it is unlikely that such analytical developments would have occurred without the intellectual roots and preoccupations of black British feminism in the 1980s”.[35]

Whilst enthusiasm was fierce for black feminist organisations, they did not always work out. In acting as an umbrella organisation covering women from many different nations, the OWAAD instigated its own downfall; despite all women involved sharing the same issue of intersectional discrimination, “gendered racisms take many different forms and often impact on diverse groups of black women in distinct ways”.[36] In the words of historian Julia Sudbury, “where the site of struggle may be shared, […] the shape of struggles may vary”[37]; where black women wanted to concentrate their efforts may not have been the same as Asian women. Tensions rose over issues of “Afro-Asian unity and sexuality”[38] within the OWAAD, which shows that the intersectional theory brewing in the 1970s and 1980s was not as comprehensive as it is today. Nevertheless, the OWAAD exceptionally advanced intersectional understandings of gender in Britain during the 1970s and 1980, and it was the influence of such black feminist groups that instigated the Women’s Liberation Movement to begin taking their struggles into consideration. For example, a magazine of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Spare Rib, was adapted to better represent black women in the 1980s. An article written in April 1982 showcasing many different black feminist groups also perfectly presented to a wider audience of readers what would soon turn into the theory of intersectionality, stating that “for too long the fact that as Black women we suffer triple oppression has been ignored — by male dominated Black groups; by white dominated women's groups; and by middle-class dominated left groups”.[39] It was also acknowledged that the continual lack of interest in the oppressions faced by black women created a reluctance to be vocal about their problems, but “by contacting each other, and working together, we have now broken this circle”[40] of reluctance and submitting. This is further evidence of the extent to which black British feminists advanced intersectional understandings of gender in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s; they went from having no recognition in the Women’s Liberation Movement to having an opportunity to spread their stories and experiences all over Britain. However, this does not mean that tensions between the Women’s Liberation Movement and black feminist groups were gone altogether; whilst there were attempts made to improve racial diversity, they did not always prove successful. White feminists found it difficult “formulating theories and praxis that could include women from a range of ethnic and racial backgrounds”[41], mainly due to the fact that black women were not as integrated in society. This was not the fault of black women; they were pushed to the outskirts of society by the oppressive nature of intersectional discrimination. However, the work and writings of black activists like Stella Dadzie to encapsulate the experiences of black women in Britain are unparalleled, as they enable white feminists to gain valuable insights to intersectionality.

Black British feminists did much to advance intersectional understandings of gender in Britain during the 1970s and 1980s, from campaigning and forming their own groups to printing periodicals and sharing their experiences with the world. In the words of historian Natalie Thomlinson, “British black feminism demanded not just a space within feminist discourse, but also a fundamental transformation of the terms of the debate. In many respects, this foreshadowed contemporary debates on ‘intersectionality’”.[42] Black women recognised and “argued that true liberation for all women could only be achieved if all facets of women’s oppression – including race and class, as well as sex – were taken into account”.[43] However, it should be noted that black British feminism as a movement “contained a variety of viewpoints rather than a commitment to a specific political ideology and practice”[44]; the understanding of intersectionality as a theory was still to come further on down the fight for equality.


Further Reading:

Brixton Black Women’s Group, ‘Black Women Organising’, Feminist Review, 17 (1984), pp. 84-89

Bryan, B., Dadzie, S., Scafe, S., The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago Press, 1985)

Carby, H. V., ‘White Woman Listen!’ in Mirza, H., S. (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 45-53

Davis, A., Women, Race and Class (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1982)

Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 123-158

Iglikowsi, V., Hillel, R., ‘Rights, Resistance and Racism: The Story of the Mangrove Nine’, The National Archives <http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/rights-resistance-racism-story-mangrove-nine/> [accessed 11/05/18]

Oral testimony from Kimberlé Crenshaw, recorded October 2016, TEDWomen 2016 <https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality>

Sudbury, J., ‘(Re)constructing multiracial blackness: women’s activism, difference and collective identity in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24.1 (2001), pp. 29-49

Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

Thomlinson, N., ‘Second-Wave Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain’, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4 (2017), pp. 432-445

Women’s Liberation Movement, ‘Black Women Together’, Spare Rib, 117 (April 1982), p. 42 <https://journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/britishlibrary/sparerib>

References:

[1] Oral testimony from Kimberlé Crenshaw, recorded October 2016, TEDWomen 2016 <https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality>

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Thomlinson, N., ‘Second-Wave Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain’, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4 (2017), p. 435

[5] Carby, H. V., ‘White Woman Listen!’ in Mirza, H., S. (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 49

[6] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 62

[7] Carby, H. V., ‘White Woman Listen!’ in Mirza, H., S. (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 49

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 126

[10] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 126

[11] Ibid., p. 132

[12] Davis, A., Women, Race and Class (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1982), back cover

[13] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 139

[14] Bryan, B., Dadzie, S., Scafe, S., The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 132

[15] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 133

[16] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 123

[17] Iglikowsi, V., Hillel, R., ‘Rights, Resistance and Racism: The Story of the Mangrove Nine’, The National Archives <http://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/blog/rights-resistance-racism-story-mangrove-nine/> [accessed 11/05/18]

[18] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 149

[19] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 151

[20] Bryan, B., Dadzie, S., Scafe, S., The Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain (London: Virago Press, 1985), p. 134

[21] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 64

[22] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 154

[23] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 72

[24] Ford, T., C., Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), p. 154

[25] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 71

[26] Brixton Black Women’s Group, ‘Black Women Organising’, Feminist Review, 17 (1984), p. 84

[27] Ibid.

[28] Thomlinson, N., ‘Second-Wave Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain’, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4 (2017), p. 434

[29] Brixton Black Women’s Group, ‘Black Women Organising’, Feminist Review, 17 (1984), p. 84

[30] Ibid., 84-85

[31] Brixton Black Women’s Group, ‘Black Women Organising’, Feminist Review, 17 (1984), p. 85

[32] Carby, H. V., ‘White Woman Listen!’ in Mirza, H., S. (ed.), Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 49

[33] Thomlinson, N., ‘Second-Wave Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain’, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4 (2017), p. 437

[34] Ibid.

[35] Thomlinson, N., ‘Second-Wave Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain’, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4 (2017), p. 437

[36] Sudbury, J., ‘(Re)constructing multiracial blackness: women’s activism, difference and collective identity in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24.1 (2001), p. 39

[37] Sudbury, J., ‘(Re)constructing multiracial blackness: women’s activism, difference and collective identity in Britain’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24.1 (2001), p. 39

[38] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 102

[39] Women’s Liberation Movement, ‘Black Women Together’, Spare Rib, 117 (April 1982), p. 42 <https://journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk/britishlibrary/sparerib>

[40] Ibid.

[41] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 159

[42] Thomlinson, N., ‘Second-Wave Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain’, Women: A Cultural Review, 27:4 (2017), p. 435

[43] Ibid.

[44] Thomlinson, N., Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 103