Reframing the 'whiteness' of U.S. Feminism : the protest movement, radical feminism, and the abjection of whiteness

Histories that track the rise of second-wave feminism frequently note that the U.S. women’s movement, in both its active constituents and the conceptualization of its aims, remained overwhelmingly white until well into the 1970s, when “the difference debate” gripped feminism. Whilst it has become customary to acknowledge the whiteness of late 1960s/early 1970s U.S. feminism, and evidence demonstrates that the initial phases of second-wave feminism were indeed profoundly shaped by a blindness to the circumstances of women of colour, what is rarely interrogated are the very conditions that produced this “whitewashing”. Second-wave feminism comprised a spectrum of groups with widely divergent understandings of women’s subordination, and an equally divergent set of strategies for putting cultural and political change into effect. However, in the late 1960s a small number of women’s groups who identified either as “politicos” or “feminists” – those now labelled “radical feminists” – came to dominate the political scene of feminism. In the following pages, I consider this relationship between the emergence of radical feminism in the late 1960s and the changing nature of the North American social protest movement. In particular, I track the origins of “white” feminism by situating radical feminism’s blindness to differences of colour in relation to the problematic currency of whiteness within the broader context of the larger social protest movement