Intersectional History: Feminism and WOC Throughout U.S. History

Apr 9

Throughout March, we celebrate Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day on the 8th of March. What often gets lost in this celebration is how this commemoration all began and what it really means to honor women’s achievements and struggle, particularly in an era when feminism is commercialized and the #girlboss is worshipped.

In 1909, the first National Women’s Day was organized and held by the women of the Socialist Party of America in New York City to demand “shorter hours, better pay, an end to child labor and the right to vote.” From the beginning, International Women’s Day was about working women and the recognition of their labor.

While working women united with wealthy, bourgeois women when it came to the issue of suffrage, they were also engaging in class struggle rather than just advocating for mere reforms. This tradition was also heavily associated with European immigrant women, demonstrating early on how women’s struggles can vary significantly while still remaining gendered issues. Even though this particular event is associated with European women, women of color have also made critical contributions to movements across time in U.S. history. However, the intersection of race, class, gender and many other social identities have often obscured these contributions.

In recent years, efforts have been made to turn intersectionality - a term that “describe(s) how race, class, gender, and other individual characteristics ‘intersect’ with one another and overlap” - into a mainstream concept. Intersectionality can be used as a tool to understand oppression and how complex it can be based on the multiplicity of social identities rather than the separation of social identities. This term was first coined by American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, however, the concept has certainly always been relevant throughout history.

For example, as early as 1851, at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner Truth delivered the speech “Ain’t I a Woman?,” describing her experience as a Black woman in the United States. Sojourner Truth was a woman who escaped slavery, became a staunch abolitionist prior to the Civil War and was “the first African American woman to win a lawsuit in the United States,” after her son was illegally sold into slavery.

Like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Marsha P. Johnson and Angela Davis are all great examples of women of color who have gone beyond political rights and fought for liberation from the confines of a white supremacist, patriarchal society.

Thanks to the popularization of intersectionality, the stories of women, particularly women of color, have made us more conscious of how history is often told through the perspective of men.

This focus on men is due to the “Great Man” theory of history which “assumes that history is driven by a small number of exceptional individuals (traditionally presumed to be men) with certain innate characteristics that predispose them for greatness.”

While learning about the stories of others besides the white man certainly enriches our historical consciousness, the Great Man theory can be used to individualize women and minorities in a way that also makes them exceptional figures. These “exceptional” figures are simply born with certain characteristics that make them natural leaders, according to this theory, rather than becoming a leader through lived experience.

Though this theory may sound simplistic, its remnants linger within popular discourse today through identity politics, or “the assertion that ‘the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.’” This concept has origins in Black feminist thought, as it was coined by Barbara Smith in 1974, however, it can also be used quite cynically in politics and culture today.

For example, what does it mean for Kamala Harris to be the first woman, Black and South Asian Vice President of the U.S. if she has a record of incarcerating Black and brown Californians and blocking minimum wage legislation (an issue that disproportionately affects women and Black and brown communities)?

What does it mean when the first Black President of the U.S. continued to militarize the police and oversaw the destruction of Libya, what “once had one of the highest standards of living” on the continent of Africa?

What does it mean when Harriet Tubman’s face is printed onto a note of currency that was once used to purchase her body and labor? As Brittney Cooper eloquently explains, “Harriet Tubman’s life was about fighting against the system that treated Black lives and Black bodies as property, currency and capital,” making the $20 bill’s new design seem disrespectful from this perspective.

Understanding the contributions of women of color to U.S. history must go beyond praising what is deemed success in a racist patriarchy in order to look at the ways in which figures have challenged systems of oppression altogether.