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Activism Protest Midrange Editorial Reported Sisters Uncut Direct Action Domestic Violence UK Photos Photo Story Young

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Inside the Anti-Domestic Violence Protests That Took Over London | Broadly

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Direction action group Sisters Uncut blocked off bridges all over the UK to protest cuts made to domestic abuse services. We joined them as they stopped traffic one on of London's busiest roads.

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Even in Iceland, the country many experts consider the world's leader in gender equity, the gender pay gap persists. Women employees make 14 to 18 percent less than men in Iceland - a discrepancy that unions and women's organizations say means women effectively work for free after 2:38 p.m. On Monday, in protest of the pay gap, thousands of Icelandic women decided to work the hours their pay merited - by leaving their workplaces promptly when the clock struck 2:38.

"[Iceland] is a good place to be a woman," says Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who in 1980 became Iceland's president and, in so doing, the world's first democratically elected woman president. Things weren't always so clear cut, however. Before October 24, 1975, when 90 percent of Iceland's women went on strike - refusing to work, cook, or even provide childcare - only nine women had ever won seats in the country's parliament. Just five years later, Finnbogadottir was elected. By 1999, more than a third of the country's MPs were women. And in 2000, Iceland's government passed a landmark parental leave legislation that many credit with helping women to return to work, and their former hours, more quickly after childbirth. Today, 90 percent of Icelandic fathers take parental leave - and research has shown that they continue to be involved in housework and childcare even after the leave is over.

The pay gap, however, has been slow to close - should the gap continue to shrink at the current rate, it would take 52 years before men and women were being paid equally. While explanations for the discrepancy vary, women and Icelandic leadership alike agree that the progress is too slow.

"It doesn't matter whether it's a gender pay gap or any other pay gap," said Gylfi Arnbjörnsson, president of the Icelandic Confederation of Labor. "It's just unacceptable to say we'll correct this in 50 years. That's a lifetime."
Read the full story at The Guardian and The Independent. Related: Polish women don black once again as protests erupt over new attempt at outlawing abortion Will Iceland be the first country to close its gender gap? Is the pay gap greater for white-collar jobs than it is for blue-collar jobs?

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Women in Iceland protest country's 14 percent pay gap by leaving work 14 percent early

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Even in Iceland, the country many experts consider the world's leader in gender equity, the gender pay gap persists. Women employees make 14 to 18 percent less than men in Iceland - a discrepancy that unions and women's organizations say means women effectively work for free after 2:38 p.m.

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SlutWalks started in 2011 in response to a flippant remark reportedly made by a police officer after a spate of sexual assaults on the campus of Canada's York University. According to local media reports, the officer said: "Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

Women in Toronto, outraged by the comment, took to the streets dressed in lingerie and skimpy clothing, to spread the message that women should not be subject to sexual violence regardless of what they're wearing.

The notion spread, and SlutWalks now occur year-round across the globe. Rose announced recently that she would headline a walk at L.A.'s Pershing Square.

"[W]e recognize that shaming, oppression, assault and violence have disproportionately impacted marginalized groups including women of color, transgender people and sex workers, and thus we are actively working to center these groups in this event," reads a statement on the Amber Rose SlutWalk webpage. "We deeply value the voices of marginalized groups and have a strong desire to find common ground among all of our intersections."

Rose, a former stripper who gained fame during her relationships with rappers Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa, has lately been speaking out against the concept of "slut shaming," or slamming a person for their sexual choices. She and friend Blac Chyna walked the MTV Video Music Awards red carpet in August wearing outfits emblazoned with phrases used to denigrate women.

Rose told the SlutWalk crowd about the first time she was "slut shamed" at 14. She then tearfully said she forgave West for saying he needed " 30 showers" after being with her and Khalifa for calling her nothing but a stripper.

Rose appeared at the walk wearing black lingerie and her signature platinum blond buzz cut. She carried a sign that said "Strippers have feelings too" and started a chant that's not publishable here -- the gist being that women own their bodies and have freedom of choice.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the march was attended by "several hundred" people, mostly women. Some wore undergarments and wrote slogans on their skin while a few even went topless. "My clothes are not my consent," said one sign.

Online supporters said the SlutWalk message is important for men and women to grasp.

"the #amberroseslutwalk was making the important point that women's bodies are theirs to control, no one elses," wrote a Twitter user who goes by "Blige."

"Closed minded people see naked women asking for attention from the #AmberRoseSlutWalk but open minded people understand the message sent," wrote another.

"Stop shaming women for their bodies and their choices," wrote J. Emanual on Twitter. "Let them own their sexuality."

Some disagreed that the "SlutWalk" is the way to go about achieving equality.

"Im thinking something has gone seriously wrong with the education of girls #feminism #amberroseslutwalk," tweeted someone who goes by DearAunty on Twitter.

"This ‪#‎amberroseslutwalk‬ is a shame. Instead of it being about defending rape victims ... it's turned into these crazies wanting to b topless. So what they are saying is that we should all walk around naked and that'll prevent rape? I'm sorry ... but I'm confused. Maybe we should teach boys to RESPECT women, instead of women degrading themselves? That's an idea," wrote Gabby Mooney on Facebook.

Milo Yiannopolous, a writer for the conservative website Breitbart staged a small counterprotest, holding a sign that read "'Rape culture' and Harry Potter. Both fantasy." He was joined by libertarian activist Lauren Southern holding a "Regret is not rape" sign.

A Go Fund Me campaign to support the Amber Rose Slut Walk and likeminded efforts had raised more than $55,000 as of Sunday. "We join the movement on this cause against sexual injustice, victim blaming, derogatory labeling and gender inequality," Rose's website says.

The walk is only Rose's latest effort to end slut shaming; she recently starred in a Funny or Die video titled "Walk of No Shame," which turns the idea of women slinking home shamefully after sexual encounters on its head.

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SlutWalks started in 2011 in response to a flippant remark reportedly made by a police officer after a spate of sexual assaults on the campus of Canada's York University. According to local media reports, the officer said: "Women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized."

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Thousands of women went on strike in Poland on Monday to protest the Polish government's attempt at new legislation that would guarantee a five-year prison sentence for women who have abortions, as well as for the doctors who provide them.

In March, an independent anti-choice group Ordo Iuris proposed the draconian legislation that's now being pushed by the government's Law and Justice (PiS) party. It's an extreme proposition, even for a country that already has incredibly restrictive abortion laws. Abortion in Poland is currently only provided under three circumstances: if there's danger to the woman who's carrying the fetus, serious or or irreversible damage to the fetus, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest (which must be confirmed by the prosecutor).

The proposed legislation being pushed by PiS successfully made it through the first round in Polish parliament ― but the protests have resulted in Polish government officials stepping back to reassess the legislation. Poland's Minister of Science and Higher Education Jaroslaw Gowin said that the protests "caused us to think and taught us humility."

Women all over Poland went on strike, flocking the streets of Warsaw, Krakow, Gdansk, Lodz and other Polish cities in protest. Women in other European cities protested in solidarity.

Take a look at 23 incredible photos ― from Warsaw to Krakow and Brussels to Bucharest ― that capture the incredible spirit of women who are fighting for their reproductive rights.

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Minister of Science and Higher Education Jaroslaw Gowin

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23 Moving Photos Of Women Demanding Reproductive Rights In Poland

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Thousands of women went on strike in Poland on Monday to protest the Polish government's attempt at new legislation that would guarantee a five-year prison sentence for women who have abortions, as well as for the doctors who provide them.

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The controversial SlutWalks are just the latest in a long string of women's demonstrations. TIME takes a look at some of feminism's most formidable protests

AP

One of the most legendary protests by second-wave feminists took place on Sept. 7, 1968, when nearly 400 women protested the Miss America pageant outside the Atlantic City Convention Center. Organizer Robin Morgan wrote that the group was protesting the pageant's promotion of the "ludicrous 'beauty' standards we ourselves are conditioned to take seriously." As the pageant was taking place, feminists marched around the "freedom trash can" in which they tossed items they perceived as symbols of feminine oppression: high heels, makeup, girdles and bras. While it was widely rumored that the trash can was then lit on fire — sparking the decades-old myth of bra-burning feminists — the protest occurred incident (and flame) free. However, thanks to the widespread media that the pageant already drew, the protest and the cause was heavily covered in newspapers across the nation.

Next The Ladies' Home Journal Sit-In

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A Brief History of Women's Protests - TIME

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The controversial SlutWalks are just the latest in a long string of women's demonstrations. TIME takes a look at some of feminism's most formidable protests One of the most legendary protests by second-wave feminists took place on Sept. 7, 1968, when nearly 400 women protested the Miss America pageant outside the Atlantic City Convention Center.

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Intersectionality | Social Inequality | MCAT | Khan Academy

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White women have a way of espousing "feminist" ideology while at the same time marginalizing the needs and opinions of women of color. And, well, being completely racist. Of course these displays are hardly ever surprising. Black women have long known that the broader feminist movement operates from a mostly white platform, hence the need to create our own political movements and spaces like womanism and black feminism. Nevertheless, white feminism never fails to rear its self-absorbed, narcissistic head, with various actresses and public figures cropping up all over the media voicing opinions that put on display the reality that white women still just do not get the idea of intersectional feminism.

To highlight these failures, here are 7 Examples Of White Feminists Failing Hard At Intersectionality.

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7 Examples of White Feminists Failing Hard At Intersectionality

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White women have a way of espousing "feminist" ideology while at the same time marginalizing the needs and opinions of women of color. And, well, being completely racist. Of course these displays are hardly ever surprising.

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Deep into the Olympics - almost to the end, really - and we've reached the Land of the Women of the Pretty Sports.

Here is Russia, paddling to its fifth straight synchronized-swimming gold, in a routine called "Angels" that involved eyebrow-skimming blue eyeshadow and headpieces resembling starfish. Here are the semifinals of rhythmic gymnastics, in which shockingly flexible athletes hurl rubber balls in the air with control that rivals Kevin Durant, while wearing uniforms that rival "Showgirls."

"They need to be very glamorous, glitzy - it's all part of the sport," said one announcer to the other during the finals of the synchronized swimming competition. "The headpieces, too, they have to be a certain size."

"Cheeky!" her co-announcer replied a few moments later. "Really good fun."

The Women of the Pretty Sports cannot be seen in prime time. The Women of the Pretty Sports - and yes, it is a women thing; these are the two female-only events in the Olympics - must be livestreamed in the middle of the day.

That well-used phrase about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels? These athletes are the absolute best in the world at what they do, and they compete with giant gauze baubles pinned to their heads while nobody at home is even watching.

Trust us, we are as tired as you of analyzing the way female athletes are treated differently in these Olympics. After commentators credited Hungarian swimmer Katinka Hosszu's world records to her husband (who remained on dry land), our eyes were too strained to keep rolling.

But as the Rio games come to a close, we can't help but look back at what the ladies were wearing, and what that meant.

[It's hard to look like a swan when you're doing a wolf turn]

The moment when women's Olympic attire became truly jarring was during the individual gymnastics competition. Oksana Chusovitina, a 41-year-old Uzbeki gymnast was competing in her seventh - seventh! - Olympics. The double-somersaulted vault that she chose is known as the "Vault of Death" and Chusovitina, who has a son older than many of her competitors, performed it while wearing a pink leotard covered in sequins, her hair secured into a high ponytail with a scrunchie.

Did she look ridiculous - half spangled, half crows feet? No, she looked like a finely tuned, slightly middle-aged machine. What Chusovitina's presence revealed as ridiculous was the costume itself: the fact that any world-class athlete should be expected to push through torn ligaments and sprained ankles, complete literally death-defying feats, always stick the landing, and do it while wearing abundant glitter.

[When did gymnastics leotards get so dang sparkly? The history of an Olympic outfit.]

Would we expect a male gymnast to do the same? Usain Bolt? Michael Phelps? Of course not - it would be silly to expect glitter for a sport competed entirely in the water. And yet somehow elaborate makeup is de rigueur for the synchronized swimmers, whose workout routines include swimming three miles a day, hours of strength and flexibility conditioning, and practicing underwater routines with weights attached to their wrists and ankles to increase stamina, according a profile on British Olympian Olivia Federici. Federici told the Guardian, "In competition, I wear lipstick and dark eye-shadow and my hair is scraped back in a bun with gelatin to accentuate our facial features so the judges can see our expressions."

Commenters and Twitter snarkers have already made note of the absurdity of "expressions" playing any kind of role at all in athletic competitions. "Please stop telling Gabby Douglas to smile," begged a headline from Women's Health magazine, because when Gabby Douglas comes in a disappointing seventh and looks a tad sad about it, she becomes "Crabby Gabby." When Michael Phelps shoots death rays from his eyeballs at a competitor, he's a delightful meme.

You tell me that all athletic costumes and accessories are designed specifically to enhance the performance of that particular sport, and I'll believe you - I'm useless with anything involving a ball, a javelin, a hurdle, a kneepad. But if that's the case, why do the male beach volleyball players compete in long shorts and loose tank tops, while their female counterparts are in bikinis? Why are female hurdlers in essentially underpants, and men in mid-thigh shorts? You tell me whether Simone Biles's powerful routines would be any less physically impressive if she completed them in a solid-color unitard?

"She's been a bit inconsistent," an announcer said of an Israeli rhythmic gymnast who faltered with a piece of equipment during her routine, around 2:30 p.m. Friday afternoon, peak time for the Women of the Pretty Sports.

"But what impressive shoulder flexibility," his partner added.

It sounded like they were talking about an athlete - and she is one. It's too bad she had to look like a tip-hungry server at Caesar's Palace.

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These women are Olympic athletes. Why do they have to look like showgirls?

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Deep into the Olympics - almost to the end, really - and we've reached the Land of the Women of the Pretty Sports. Here is Russia, paddling to its fifth straight synchronized-swimming gold, in a routine called "Angels" that involved eyebrow-skimming blue eyeshadow and headpieces resembling starfish.

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"Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women."
-the Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977¹ "The concept of the simultaneity of oppression is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological contributions of Black feminist thought."
-Black feminist and scholar Barbara Smith, 1983²
Black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" in her insightful 1989 essay, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." ³ The concept of intersectionality is not an abstract notion but a description of the way multiple oppressions are experienced. Indeed, Crenshaw uses the following analogy, referring to a traffic intersection, or crossroad, to concretize the concept:

Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. . . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm. ⁴

Crenshaw argues that Black women are discriminated against in ways that often do not fit neatly within the legal categories of either "racism" or "sexism"-but as a combination of both racism and sexism. Yet the legal system has generally defined sexism as based upon an unspoken reference to the injustices confronted by all (including white) women, while defining racism to refer to those faced by all (including male) Blacks and other people of color. This framework frequently renders Black women legally "invisible" and without legal recourse.

Crenshaw describes several employment discrimination-based lawsuits to illustrate how Black women's complaints often fall between the cracks precisely because they are discriminated against both as women and as Blacks. The ruling in one such case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, filed by five Black women in 1976, demonstrates this point vividly.

The General Motors Corporation had never hired a Black woman for its workforce before 1964-the year the Civil Rights Act passed through Congress. All of the Black women hired after 1970 lost their jobs fairly quickly, however, in mass layoffs during the 1973-75 recession. Such a sweeping loss of jobs among Black women led the plaintiffs to argue that seniority-based layoffs, guided by the principle "last hired-first fired," discriminated against Black women workers at General Motors, extending past discriminatory practices by the company.

Yet the court refused to allow the plaintiffs to combine sex-based and race-based discrimination into a single category of discrimination:

The plaintiffs allege that they are suing on behalf of black women, and that therefore this lawsuit attempts to combine two causes of action into a new special sub-category, namely, a combination of racial and sex-based discrimination.... The plaintiffs are clearly entitled to a remedy if they have been discriminated against. However, they should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new "super-remedy" which would give them relief beyond what the drafters of the relevant statutes intended. Thus, this lawsuit must be examined to see if it states a cause of action for race discrimination, sex discrimination, or alternatively either, but not a combination of both. ⁵

In its decision, the court soundly rejected the creation of "a new classification of 'black women' who would have greater standing than, for example, a black male. The prospect of the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, clearly raises the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora's box." ⁶

Crenshaw observes of this ruling that "providing legal relief only when Black women show that their claims are based on race or on sex is analogous to calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified." ⁷

"Ain't we women?"
After Crenshaw introduced the term intersectionality in 1989, it was widely adopted because it managed to encompass in a single word the simultaneous experience of the multiple oppressions faced by Black women. But the concept was not a new one. Since the times of slavery, Black women have eloquently described the multiple oppressions of race, class, and gender-referring to this concept as "interlocking oppressions," "simultaneous oppressions," "double jeopardy," "triple jeopardy" or any number of descriptive terms. ⁸

Like most other Black feminists, Crenshaw emphasizes the importance of Sojourner Truth's famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech delivered to the 1851 Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio:

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I could have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man-when I could get it-and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman? ⁹

Truth's words vividly contrast the character of oppression faced by white and Black women. While white middle-class women have traditionally been treated as delicate and overly emotional-destined to subordinate themselves to white men-Black women have been denigrated and subject to the racist abuse that is a foundational element of US society. Yet, as Crenshaw notes, "When Sojourner Truth rose to speak, many white women urged that she be silenced, fearing that she would divert attention from women's suffrage to emancipation," invoking a clear illustration of the degree of racism within the suffrage movement. ¹⁰

Crenshaw draws a parallel between Truth's experience with the white suffrage movement and Black women's experience with modern feminism, arguing, "When feminist theory and politics that claim to reflect women's experiences and women's aspirations do not include or speak to Black women, Black women must ask, "Ain't we women?"

Intersectionality as a synthesis of oppressions
Thus, Crenshaw's political aims reach further than addressing flaws in the legal system. She argues that Black women are frequently absent from analyses of either gender oppression or racism, since the former focuses primarily on the experiences of white women and the latter on Black men. She seeks to challenge both feminist and antiracist theory and practice that neglect to "accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender," arguing that "because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated." ¹¹

Crenshaw argues that a key aspect of intersectionality lies in its recognition that multiple oppressions are not each suffered separately but rather as a single, synthesized experience. This has enormous significance at the very practical level of movement building.

In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, published in 1990, Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins extends and updates the social contradictions raised by Sojourner Truth, while crediting collective struggles waged historically with establishing a "collective wisdom" among Black women:

If women are allegedly passive and fragile, then why are Black women treated as "mules" and assigned heavy cleaning chores? If good mothers are supposed to stay at home with their children, then why are US Black women on public assistance forced to find jobs and leave their children in day care? If women's highest calling is to become mothers, then why are Black teen mothers pressured to use Norplant and Depo Provera? In the absence of a viable Black feminism that investigates how intersecting oppressions of race, gender, and class foster these contradictions, the angle of vision created by being deemed devalued workers and failed mothers could easily be turned inward, leading to internalized oppression. But the legacy of struggle among US Black women suggests that a collectively shared Black women's oppositional knowledge has long existed. This collective wisdom in turn has spurred US Black women to generate a more specialized knowledge, namely, Black feminist thought as critical social theory. ¹²

Like Crenshaw, Collins uses the concept of intersectionality to analyze how "oppressions [such as 'race and gender' or 'sexuality and nation'] work together in producing injustice." But Collins adds the concept "matrix of dominations" to this formulation: "In contrast, the matrix of dominations refers to how these intersecting oppressions are actually organized. Regardless of the particular intersections involved, structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains of power reappear across quite different forms of oppression." ¹³

Elsewhere, Collins acknowledges the crucial component of social class among Black women in shaping political perceptions. In "The Contours of an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology," she argues that "[w]hile a Black woman's standpoint and its accompanying epistemology stem from Black women's consciousness of race and gender oppression, they are not simply the result of combining Afrocentric and female values- standpoints are rooted in real material conditions structured by social class." ¹⁴[Emphasis added.]

Fighting sexism in a profoundly racist society
Because of the historic role of slavery and racial segregation in the United States, the development of a unified women's movement requires recognizing the manifold implications of this continuing racial divide. While all women are oppressed as women, no movement can claim to speak for all women unless it speaks for women who also face the consequences of racism-which place women of color disproportionately in the ranks of the working class and the poor. Race and class therefore must be central to the project of women's liberation if it is to be meaningful to those women who are most oppressed by the system.

Indeed, one of the key weaknesses of the predominantly white US feminist movement has been its lack of attention to racism, with enormous repercussions. Failure to confront racism ends up reproducing the racist status quo.

The widely accepted narrative of the modern feminist movement is that it initially involved white women beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, who were later joined by women of color following in their footsteps. But this narrative is factually incorrect.

Decades before the rise of the modern women's liberation movement, Black women were organizing against their systematic rape at the hands of white racist men. Women civil rights activists, including Rosa Parks, were part of a vocal grassroots movement to defend Black women subject to racist sexual assaults-in an intersection of oppression unique to Black women historically in the United States.

Danielle L. McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance-A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power ¹⁵ argues that

throughout the twentieth century...Black women regularly denounced their sexual misuse. By deploying their voices as weapons in the wars against white supremacy, whether in the church, the courtroom, or in congressional hearings, African American women loudly resisted what Martin Luther King, Jr., called the "thingification" of their humanity. Decades before radical feminists in the women's movement urged rape survivors to "speak out," African American women's public protests galvanized local, national, and even international outrage and sparked larger campaigns for racial justice and human dignity. ¹⁶

The invention of the Black "matriarchy"
In the 1960s, the contrast between white middle-class and Black women's oppression could not have been more obvious. The same "experts" who prescribed a life of happy homemaking for white suburban women, as documented in Betty Friedan's enormously popular The Feminine Mystique,reprimanded Black women for their failure to conform to this model. ¹⁷ Because Black mothers have traditionally worked outside the home in much larger numbers than their white counterparts, they were blamed for a range of social ills on the basis of their relative economic independence.

Socialist-feminist Stephanie Coontz describes "Freudians and social scientists" who "insisted that Black men had been doubly emasculated-first by slavery and later by the economic independence of their women." Many in the African-American media also accepted this analysis. A 1960 Ebony magazine article stated plainly that the traditional independence of the Black woman meant that she was "more in conflict with her innate biological role than the white woman." ¹⁸

This theme emerged full throttle in 1965, when the US Department of Labor issued a report entitled, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action." The report, authored by future Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, describes a "Black matriarchy" at the center of a "tangle of pathology" afflicting Black families, leading to a cycle of poverty. "A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife," in which Black women consistently earn more than their men, argues Moynihan.

The report states, "In essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole." The report explains why this is the case:

There is, presumably, no special reason why a society in which males are dominant in family relationships is to be preferred to a matriarchal arrangement. However, it is clearly a disadvantage for a minority group to be operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another. This is the present situation of the Negro. Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage. ¹⁹

This example demonstrates why gender discrimination cannot be effectively understood without factoring in the role of racism. And Black feminists since that time have made a priority of examining the interlocking relationship between gender, race, and class that many white feminists tended to ignore at the time. In so doing, they demonstrated that women of color are not merely "doubly oppressed" by both sexism and racism. Black women's experience of sexism is shaped equally by racism and class inequality and is therefore different in certain respects from the experience of white, middle-class women.

"Two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal"
The 1950s and1960s was also a period of intensive racial polarization in the United States, as the massive Civil Rights Movement struggled to end both Jim Crow segregation throughout the South and de facto racial segregation in the North. Interracial marriage was still banned in sixteen states in 1967 when the Supreme Court finally ruled such bans unconstitutional in the Loving v. Virginia decision.

Urban rebellions swept the country in the mid- to late-sixties, touched off by police brutality and other forms of racial discrimination in poverty-stricken Black ghettoes. In 1967, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission, was established to investigate the root causes of urban rebellions. In 1968, the Commission issued a report that included scathing indictment of racism and segregation in US society. The report concludes:

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white-separate and unequal.... Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget-is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. ²⁰

The Kerner Commission emphasized that much of the problem was rooted in "[p]ervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress." The Commission concluded that the degree of housing segregation was such that "to create an unsegregated population distribution, an average of over 86 percent of all Negroes would have to change their place of residence within the city." ²¹

In response to the extreme degree of racism and sexism they faced in the 1960s, Black women and other women of color began organizing against their oppression, forming a multitude of organizations. In 1968, for example, Black women from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed the Third World Women's Alliance. In 1973, a group of notable Black feminists, including Florynce Kennedy, Alice Walker, and Barbara Smith, formed the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). In 1974, Barbara Smith joined with a group of other Black lesbian feminists to found the Boston-based Combahee River Collective as a self-consciously radical alternative to the NBFO. The Combahee River Collective was named to commemorate the successful Underground Railroad Combahee River Raid of 1863, planned and led by Harriet Tubman, which freed 750 slaves.

The Combahee River Collective's defining statement, issued in 1977, described its vision for Black feminism as opposing all forms of oppression-including sexuality, gender identity, class, disability, and age oppression-later embedded in the concept of intersectionality.

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 integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the 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. ²²

They added, "We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression." ²³

The consequences of ignoring class and racial differences between women
As noted above, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, gave voice to the anguish of white middle-class homemakers who were trapped in their suburban homes, doomed to lives revolving around fulfilling their families' every need. The book immediately struck a chord with millions of women who desperately sought to escape the stultifying world of household drudgery.

Friedan's book, however, ignored the importance of the very real class and racial differences that exist between women. She made a conscious decision to target this particular audience of white middle-class women. As Coontz notes, "[T]he content of The Feminine Mystique and the marketing strategy that Friedan and her publishers devised for it ignored Black women's positive examples of Friedan's argument." Friedan surely knew better. She had traveled in left-wing labor circles during the 1930s and 1940s but decided in the mid-1950s (at the height of the anticommunist witch hunts of the McCarthy era) to reinvent herself as an apolitical suburban wife. ²⁴

Few Black women or working-class women of any race would have been able to afford Friedan's proposal that women hire domestic workers to perform their daily household chores while they were at work. Thus, "Black women who did read the book seldom responded as enthusiastically as did her white readers." ²⁵

Friedan praises those stay-at-home moms who had shown the courage to break from their traditional roles to seek well-paying careers, writing sympathetically that these women "had problems of course, tough ones-juggling their pregnancies, finding nurses and housekeepers, having to give up good assignments when their husbands were transferred." ³¹ Yet she doesn't deem it worthy to comment on the lives of the nursemaids and the housekeepers these career women hire, who also work all day but then return home to face housework and child care responsibilities of their own.

Soon after The Feminine Mystique was published, left-wing civil rights activist and women's historian Gerda Lerner wrote to Friedan, praising the book but also expressing "one reservation:" Friedan had addressed the book "solely to the problems of middle class, college-educated women." Lerner notes that "working women, especially Negro women, labor not only under the disadvantages imposed by the feminine mystique, but under the more pressing disadvantages of economic discrimination." ²⁶

It is also worth noting that Friedan introduces a profoundly anti-gay theme in The Feminine Mystique that would reverberate in her organizing efforts into the 1970s. She argues that "the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene" has its roots in the feminine mystique, which can produce "the kind of mother-son devotion that can produce latent or overt homosexuality.... The boy smothered by such parasitical mother-love is kept from growing up, not only sexually, but in all ways." ²⁷

Reproducing the myth of the Black rapist
But racism was not limited to the more conservative wing of the women's movement. Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, published in 1975, describes the root of women's oppression in the crudest of biological terms, based on men's physical ability to rape: "When men discovered that they could rape, they proceeded to do it.... Man's discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the present, I believe, rape has played a critical function." On this basis, Brownmiller concludes that men use rape to enforce their power over women: "[I]t is nothing more and nothing less than a conscious process by which all men keep all women in a state of fear." ²⁸

This theoretical framework, based purely on the supposed biological differences between men and women, allowed Brownmiller to justify reactionary assumptions in the name of combating women's oppression. She reaches openly racist conclusions in her account of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till. Fourteen-year-old Till, visiting family in Jim Crow Mississippi that summer, committed the "crime" of whistling at a married white woman named Carolyn Bryant, in a teenage prank. Till was tortured and shot before his young body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

Despite Till's lynching, Brownmiller describes Till and his killer as sharing power over a "white woman," using stereotypes that Black activist and scholar Angela Davis called "the resuscitation of the old racist myth of the Black rapist." 29

Brownmiller's own words illustrate Davis's insight:

Rarely has one single case exposed so clearly as Till's the underlying group male antagonisms over access to women, for what began in Bryant's store should not be misconstrued as an innocent flirtation.... Emmett Till was going to show his black buddies that he, and by inference, they could get a white woman and Carolyn Bryant was the nearest convenient object.In concrete terms, the accessibility of all white women was on review. 30

Brownmiller also wrote,

And what of the wolf whistle, Till's 'gesture of adolescent bravado?'... The whistle was no small tweet of hubba-hubba or melodious approval for a well turned ankle.... It was a deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her. ³¹

The acclaimed novelist, poet, and activist Alice Walker responded in the New York Times Book Review in 1975, "Emmett Till was not a rapist. He was not even a man. He was a child who did not understand that whistling at a white woman could cost him his life." ³² Davis described the contradictions inherent in Brownmiller's analysis of rape: "In choosing to take sides with white women, regardless of the circumstances, Brownmiller herself capitulates to racism. Her failure to alert white women about the urgency of combining a fierce challenge to racism with the necessary battle against sexism is an important plus for the forces of racism today." ³³

In 1976, Time magazine named Susan Brownmiller one of its "women of the year," praising her book as "the most rigorous and provocative piece of scholarship that has yet emerged from the feminist movement." ³⁴ The objections to Brownmiller's overtly racist standpoint from accomplished Black women such as Davis and Walker went largely unnoticed by the political mainstream.

Fighting sexism and racism in the 1970s
It must be acknowledged that many women of color who identified as feminists in the 1970s and 1980s were strongly critical of mainstream feminism's refusal to challenge racism and other forms of oppression. Barbara Smith, for example, argued for the inclusion of all the oppressed in a 1979 speech, in a clear challenge to white, middle-class, heterosexual feminists:

The reason racism is a feminist issue is easily explained by the inherent definition of feminism. Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement. ³⁵

But during the 1960s and 1970s, many Black women and other women of color also felt sidelined and alienated by the lack of attention to women's liberation inside nationalist and other antiracist movements. The Combahee River Collective, for example, was made up of women who were veterans of the Black Panther Party and other antiracist organizations. In this political context, Black feminists established a tradition that rejects prioritizing women's oppression over racism, and vice versa. This tradition assumes the connection between racism and poverty in capitalist society, thereby rejecting middle-class strategies for women's liberation that disregard the centrality of class in poor and working-class women's lives.

Black feminists such as Angela Davis contested the theory and practice of white feminists who failed to address the centrality of racism. Davis's groundbreaking book, Women, Race and Class, for example, examines the history of Black women in the United States from a Marxist perspective beginning with the system of slavery and continuing through to modern capitalism. Her book also examines the ways in which the issues of reproductive rights and rape, in particular, represent profoundly different experiences for Black and white women because of racism. Each of these is examined below.

* Reproductive rights and racist sterilization abuse
Mainstream feminists of the 1960s and 1970s regarded the issue of reproductive rights as exclusively the winning of legal abortion, without acknowledging the racist policies that have historically prevented women of color from bearing and raising as many children as they wanted.

Davis argues that the history of the birth control movement and its racist sterilization programs necessarily make the issue of reproductive rights far more complicated for Black women and other women of color, who have historically been the targets of this abuse. Davis traces the path of twentieth-century birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger from her early days as a socialist to her conversion to the eugenics movement, an openly racist approach to population control based on the slogan, "[More] children from the fit, less from the unfit."

Those "unfit" to bear children, according to the eugenicists, included the mentally and physically disabled, prisoners, and the non-white poor. As Davis noted, "By 1932, the Eugenics Society could boast that at least twenty-six states had passed compulsory sterilization laws, and that thousands of 'unfit' persons had been surgically prevented from reproducing."

In launching the "Negro Project" in 1939, Sanger's American Birth Control League argued, "[T]he mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously." In a personal letter, Sanger confided, "We do not want word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to their more rebellious members." ³⁶

Racist population-control policies left large numbers of Black women, Latinas, and Native American women sterilized against their will or without their knowledge. In 1974, an Alabama court found that between 100,000 and 150,000 poor Black teenagers were sterilized each year in Alabama.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed an epidemic of sterilization abuse and other forms of coercion aimed at Black, Native American, and Latina women-alongside a sharp rise in struggles against this mistreatment. A 1970s study showed that 25 percent of Native American women had been sterilized, and that Black and Latina married women had been sterilized in much greater proportions than married women in the population at large. By 1968, one-third of women of childbearing age in Puerto Rico-still a US colony-had been permanently sterilized. ³⁷

Yet mainstream white feminists not only ignored these struggles but also added to the problem. Many embraced the goals of population control with all its racist implications as an ostensibly "liberal" cause.

In 1972, for example, a time when Native Americans and other women of color were struggling against coercive adoption policies that targeted their communities, Ms. Magazine asked its predominantly white and middle-class readership, "'What do you do if you're a conscientious citizen, concerned about the population explosion and ecological problems, love children, want to see what one of your own would look like, and want more than one?' Ms. offered as a solution: 'Have One, Adopt One.'" 38 The children on offer for adoption were overwhelmingly Native American, Black, Latino, and Asian.

To be sure, the legalization of abortion in the US Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision was of paramount importance to all women and the direct result of grassroots struggle. Because of both the economic and social consequences of racism, the lives of Black women, Latinas, and other women of color were most at risk when abortion was illegal. Before abortion was made legal in New York City in 1970, for example, Black women made up 50 percent of all women who died after an illegal abortion, while Puerto Rican women were 44 percent. ³⁹

The legalization of abortion in 1973 is usually regarded as the most important success of the modern women's movement. That victory however was accompanied at the end of that decade by the far less heralded but equally important victories against sterilization abuse, the result of grassroots struggles waged primarily by women of color. In 1978, the federal government conceded to demands by Native American, Black, and Latina activists by finally establishing regulations for sterilization. These included required waiting periods and authorization forms in the same language spoken by the woman agreeing to be sterilized. ⁴⁰

Davis notes that women of color "were far more familiar than their white sisters with the murderously clumsy scalpels of inept abortionists seeking profit in illegality," ⁴¹ yet were virtually absent from abortion rights campaigns. She concludes, "[T]he abortion rights activists of the early 1970s should have examined the history of their movement. Had they done so, they might have understood why so many of their Black sisters adopted a posture of suspicion toward their cause." ⁴²

* The racial component of rape
Rape is one of the most damaging manifestations of women's oppression the world over. But rape also has had a toxic racial component in the United States since the time of slavery, as a key weapon in maintaining the system of white supremacy. Davis argues that rape is "an essential dimension of the social relations between slave master and slave," involving the routine rape of Black slave women by their white masters. ⁴³

She describes rape as "a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish slave women's will to resist and, in the process, to demoralize their men." ⁴⁴ The institutionalized rape of Black women survived the abolition of slavery and took on its modern form: "Group rape, perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist organizations of the post-Civil War period, became an uncamouflaged political weapon in the drive to thwart the movement for Black equality." ⁴⁵

Black Marxist-feminist Gloria Joseph makes the following insightful observation of the shared experience of racism among Black women and men: "The slave experience for Blacks in the United States made an ironic contribution to male-female equality. Laboring in the fields or in the homes, men and women were equally dehumanized and brutalized." In modern society, she concludes, "The rape of Black women and the lynching and castration of Black men are equally heinous in their nature." ⁴⁶

The caricature of the virtuous white Southern belle under constant prey by Black male rapists had its opposite in the promiscuous Black woman seeking the sexual attention of white men. As Davis argues, "The fictional image of the Black man as rapist has always strengthened its inseparable companion: the image of the Black woman as chronically promiscuous.... Viewed as 'loose women' and whores, Black women's cries of rape would necessarily lack legitimacy." ⁴⁷ As Lerner likewise describes, "The myth of the Black rapist of white women is the twin of the myth of the bad Black woman-both designed to apologize for and facilitate the continued exploitation of Black men and women." ⁴⁸

Brownmiller was not alone in failing to challenge racist assumptions about rape, with the consequence of reproducing them. Davis strongly criticizes 1970s-era white feminists for neglecting to integrate an analysis of racism with the theory and practice of combating rape: "During the contemporary anti-rape movement, few feminist theorists seriously analyzed the special circumstances surrounding the Black woman as rape victim. The historical knot binding Black women-systematically abused and violated by white men-to Black men-maimed and murdered because of the racist manipulation of the rape charge-has just begun to be acknowledged to any significant extent." ⁴⁹

Left-wing Black feminism as a politics of inclusion
This article has attempted to show how Black feminists since the time of slavery have developed a distinct political tradition based upon a systematic analysis of the interlocking oppressions of race, gender, and class. Since the 1970s, Black feminists and other feminists of color in the United States have built upon this analysis and developed an approach that provides a strategy for combating all forms of oppression within a common struggle.

Black feminists-along with Latinas and other women of color-of the 1960s era, who were critical of both the predominantly white feminist movement for its racism and of nationalist and other antiracist movements for their sexism, often formed separate organizations that could address the particular oppressions they faced. And when they rightfully asserted the racial and class differences between women, they did so because these differences were largely ignored and neglected by much of the women's movement at that time, thereby rendering Black women and other women of color invisible in theory and in practice.

The end goal was not, however, permanent racial separation for most left-wing Black and other feminists of color, as it has come to be understood since. Barbara Smith conceived of an inclusive approach to combat multiple oppressions, beginning with coalition building around particular struggles. As she observed in 1983, "The most progressive sectors of the women's movement, including radical white women, have taken [issues of racism], and many more, quite seriously." ⁵⁰ Asian American feminist Merle Woo argues explicitly: "Today...I feel even more deeply hurt when I realize how many people, how so many people, because of racism and sexism, fail to see what power we sacrifice by not joining hands." But, she adds, "not all white women are racist, and not all Asian-American men are sexist. And there are visible changes. Real, tangible, positive changes." ⁵¹

The aim of intersectionality within the Black feminist tradition has been toward building a stronger movement for women's liberation that represents the interests of all women. Barbara Smith described her own vision of feminism in 1984: "I have often wished I could spread the word that a movement committed to fighting sexual, racial, economic and heterosexist oppression, not to mention one which opposes imperialism, anti-Semitism, the oppressions visited upon the physically disabled, the old and the young, at the same time that it challenges militarism and imminent nuclear destruction is the very opposite of narrow." ⁵²

This approach to fighting oppression does not merely complement but also strengthens Marxist theory and practice-which seeks to unite not only all those who are exploited but also all those who are oppressed by capitalism into a single movement that fights for the liberation of all humanity. The Black feminist approach described above enhances Lenin's famous phrase from What is to be Done?: "Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected-unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other." ⁵³

The Combahee River Collective, which was perhaps the most self-consciously left-wing organization of Black feminists in the 1970s, acknowledged its adherence to socialism and anti-imperialism, while rightfully also arguing for greater attention to oppression:

We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.... Although we are in essential agreement with Marx's theory as it applied to the very specific economic relationships he analyzed, we know that his analysis must be extended further in order for us to understand our specific economic situation as Black women. ⁵⁴

At the same time, intersectionality cannot replace Marxism-and Black feminists have never attempted to do so. Intersectionality is a concept for understanding oppression, not exploitation. Even the commonly used term "classism" describes an aspect of class oppression-snobbery and elitism-not exploitation. Most Black feminists acknowledge the systemic roots of racism and sexism but place far less emphasis than Marxists on the connection between the system of exploitation and oppression.

Marxism is necessary because it provides a framework for understanding the relationship between oppression and exploitation (i.e., oppression as a byproduct of the system of class exploitation), and also identifies the strategy for creating the material and social conditions that will make it possible to end both oppression and exploitation. Marxism's critics have disparaged this framework as an aspect of Marx's "economic reductionism."

But, as Marxist-feminist Martha Gimenez responds, "To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to 'reduce' gender or racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and 'nameless' power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in 'intersectionality' is class power." ⁵⁵ The working class holds the potential to lead a struggle in the interests of all those who suffer injustice and oppression. This is because both exploitation and oppression are rooted in capitalism. Exploitation is the method by which the ruling class robs workers of surplus value; the various forms of oppression play a primary role in maintaining the rule of a tiny minority over the vast majority. In each case, the enemy is one and the same.

The class struggle helps to educate workers-sometimes very rapidly-challenging reactionary ideas and prejudices that keep workers divided. When workers go on strike, confronting capital and its agents of repression (the police), the class nature of society becomes suddenly clarified. Racist, sexist, or homophobic ideas cultivated over a lifetime can disappear within a matter of days in a mass strike wave. The sight of hundreds of police lined up to protect the boss's property or to usher in a bunch of scabs speaks volumes about the class nature of the state within capitalism.

The process of struggle also exposes another truth hidden beneath layers of ruling-class ideology: as the producers of the goods and services that keep capitalism running, workers have the ability to shut down the system through a mass strike. And workers not only have the power to shut down the system, but also to replace it with a socialist society, based upon collective ownership of the means of production. Although other groups in society suffer oppression, only the working class possesses this objective power.

These are the basic reasons why Marx argues that capitalism created its own gravediggers in the working class. But when Marx defines the working class as the agent for revolutionary change, he is describing its historical potential, rather than a foregone conclusion. This is the key to understanding Lenin's words, cited above. The whole Leninist conception of the vanguard party rests on understanding that a battle of ideas must be fought inside the working class movement. A section of workers won to a socialist alternative and organized into a revolutionary party, can win other workers away from ruling-class ideologies and provide an alternative worldview. For Lenin, the notion of political consciousness entails workers' willingness to champion the interests of all the oppressed in society, as an integral part of the struggle for socialism.

As an additive to Marxist theory, intersectionality leads the way toward a much higher level of understanding of the character of oppression than that developed by classical Marxists, enabling the further development of the ways in which solidarity can be built between all those who suffer oppression and exploitation under capitalism to forge a unified movement.

1. The Combahee River Collective, April 1977. Quoted, for example, in Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: The New Press, 1995), 235. The statement is available online at www.circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html.

2. Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), xxxiv.

3. Kimberlé Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics," University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989, 139-67.

4. Ibid., 149.

5. Crenshaw, "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex," 142.

6. Ibid., 143.

7. Ibid.

8. See, for example, Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire.

9. Sojourner Truth, "Ain't I a Woman?" Women's Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 28-29, 1851. Quoted in Crenshaw, 153.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., 140.

12. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11-12.

13. Ibid., 18.

14. Quoted in Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire, 345.

15. Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance-A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Random House, 2010).

16. Ibid., xix-xx.

17. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.W. Norton, 1964).

18. Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (Basic Books, 2011), 124.

19. Office of Planning and Research, US Department of Labor, "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, (March 1965)." Available online at www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/webid-m....

20. Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), 1-29. Available online at www.eisenhowerfoundation.org/docs/kerner....

21. Ibid.

22. Combahee River Collective Statement.

23. Ibid.

24. Coontz, A Strange Stirring, 140.

25. Ibid., 126.

26. Ibid., 101.

27. Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 263-64.

28. Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Ballantine, 1993), 14-15.

29. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 178.

30. Brownmiller, Against Our Will, 272.

31. Ibid., 247.

32. Alice Walker quoted in D.H. Melhem, Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 249.

33. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 188-89.

34. Ibid., 178.

35. Quoted in Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called my Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 61.

36. Davis, Women, Race & Class, 213-15.

37. Rickie Solinger, ed., Abortion Wars: A Half Century of Struggle, 1950-2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 132; Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA) and Susan E. Davis, ed., Women Under Attack (Boston: South End Press, 1988), 28.

38. Quoted in Meg Devlin O'Sullivan, "'We Worry About Survival': American Indian Women, Sovereignty, and the Right to Bear and Raise Children in the 1970s," Dissertation, (Chapel Hill: 2007). Available online at www.cdr.lib.unc.edu/indexablecontent?id=uuid:7a462a63-5185-4140-8f3f-ad094b75f04d&ds=DATA_FILE.

39. Guardian (US), April 12, 1989, 7.

40. Jael Silliman, Marlene Gerber Fried, et al., Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice (Cambridge: South End Press, 2004), 10.

41. Davis, 204.

42. Ibid., 215.

43. Ibid., 175.

44. Ibid., 24.

45. Ibid., 176.

46. Lydia Sargent, ed, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 1981), 94.

47. Davis, 182.

48. Quoted in Davis, 174.

49. Ibid., 173.

50. Smith, op cit., xxxi.

51. Moraga and Anzaldúa, The Bridge Called My Back, 146.

52. Smith, Home Girls, 257-58.

53. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, "What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement," Lenin's Collected Works Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 412. Available online at www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm.

54. Combahee River Collective.

55. Martha Gimenez, "Marxism and Class, Gender and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy," Race, Gender & Class (2001: Vol. 8, No. 2), 22-33. Available online at www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html.

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Have you ever heard the term intersectionality and wondered what it means? Better yet, why is it important when we're discussing the discrimination that different groups of people face? If so, this post is for you.
What Is Intersectionality?
Intersectionality is a sociological theory about how an individual can face multiple threats of discrimination when their identities overlap a number of minority classes, such as race, gender, age, ethnicity, health and other characteristics.

For example, a woman of color may face sexism in the workplace which is compounded by subtle yet pervasive racism. Extending that example further, we know that trans* women of color face exceptionally high levels of discrimination and threats of violence. Looking through the lens of intersectionality, it may not be hard to see why: they face anti-trans prejudice, sexism and misogyny, and racism, and due to the ignorance surrounding trans identity, might also face homophobia too.

While intersectionality is traditionally applied to women, it's not just women who are affected by this phenomena of overlapping minority status. A man from a Hispanic background could face xenophobia in today's America despite being a naturalized citizen, which in turn may be compounded by, for instance, a low economic status. If that Hispanic man is in his 50s, ageism might add to the discrimination he could face in trying to secure employment.

More precisely though, intersectionality describes the hierarchical nature of power and how belonging to multiple discriminated classes can mean that one's issues are ignored.
Who Came Up With the Term Intersectionality and Why?
The term intersectionality itself is attributed to legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw and her 1989 essay "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color," though the actual notion behind intersectionality extends further back than that, with academics recognizing the problem as early as the 19th century.

Crenshaw coined the term to express the particular problems that immigrant women of color face and, crucially, why their issues were being ignored by both the feminist movement of the time, and the anti-racism movement.

Often, the problems intersectional experiences reveal is not that individual people are overtly sexist or racist, but that the legal and policy mechanisms we have in place to deal with complaints like, for instance, an immigrant woman who doesn't speak English trying to report her abusive husband, are stacked against people with a multiple minority identity by, for example, not having interpreters on hand, or not understanding enough about the woman's particular cultural heritage to understand the best way to deal with her situation.
Intersectionality Isn't Popular With Everyone
Within each separate movement, such as feminism and the anti-racism movement, there are those who say that intersectionality is actually harmful to their individual causes. The arguments against intersectionality tend to focus on a few areas. One is that intersectionality is a nonsense word and in reality doesn't describe anything. If a woman experiences racism then it is racism. If she experiences sexism then it is sexism. There is no need to overlap these, so the school of thought goes. But there is a strong body of evidence to suggest that discrimination does overlap, so while we might deal with the issues separately, denying that overlap could leave people vulnerable.

That's not to say that intersectionality as an analytical tool doesn't have its problems, however, and one of the chief ones is that for both scholars of racism and feminism, it remains a rather murkily defined tool and one that we are still struggling to effectively apply in our discussions of discrimination and how to protect multiple-minority people.

Another more general point is that looking at the smaller problems minorities within the larger movement face could rob the entire movement of its power. Answering that criticism explains quite neatly the role intersectionality can have in today's civil rights movements, and so we'll move on to that topic next.
Why Does Intersectionality Matter to Modern Civil Rights Movements?
While accepting that intersectionality needs refining as a tool, a majority of social commentators and mainstream feminist and racial justice groups believe intersectionality does have an important role to play in today's civil rights movements.

Take the gay rights movement that is often called upon to speak for the wider LGBTQA umbrella. Our figureheads are overwhelmingly white, cis-gendered, able-bodied men and women, and while that's understandable, it can be a problem. This is not to say that they themselves are discriminating against anyone at all, but rather that they are representative of only one aspect of the LGBT community - and in this case, an aspect that is very close to the majority heterosexual experience.

Seen in this way, it becomes obvious why, in particular when the media sees only this face of the LGBT rights movement, the problems that, say, LGBT Asian Americans or LGBT people with physical disabilities face might be forgotten and their goals, like changing laws for better health care or job discrimination protections, may not be achieved because of a lack of attention.

To return us to intersectionality's main focus, that being the problems that women of color face due to sexism and racism, we see this manifesting today in many ways, not least of which is in the fight for reproductive justice and how the closing of women's health clinics and the passing of antagonistic anti-abortion measures can disproportionately affect women of color, and particularly those from lower economic backgrounds.

As such, while intersectionality might not be a perfect tool, recognizing its uses and limitations does help us to ensure that we aren't overlooking the challenges people belonging to multiple minorities face as we move toward the goal of a fairer and more equal society.
Photo credit: Thinkstock.

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What Is Intersectionality And Why Is It Important? | Care2 Causes

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Have you ever heard the term intersectionality and wondered what it means? Better yet, why is it important when we're discussing the discrimination that different groups of people face? If so, this post is for you. What Is Intersectionality?

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Tomi Lahren - The “Racist” Label | FINAL THOUGHTS

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She said "I don't care what you call me." -- © ALL COPYRIGHTS RESERVED FOR THE BLAZE TV WATCH MORE PROGRAMMES ON http://TheBlaze.com/TV TOMI LAHREN PROGRAMME : FINAL THOUGHTS -- FOLLOW TOMI ON FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/TomiLahren

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Lately anyone who is paying attention has been thunderstruck by the stark realization that racism is not only still alive in America but flourishing. And not only is it flourishing but it is doing so with the ongoing help of systems ostensibly put in place to protect all American citizens. Some of the things that have happened in the past few years are so despicable that they hardly seem possible in the "modern day America" we like to believe we are living in. Last week, nine black people were murdered in a church in Charleston by an avowed white supremacist.

Twenty-two-year-old Kalief Browder committed suicide after being arrested at age 16 and jailed at Rikers Island without a trial for three years, two of those in solitary confinement. His death woke many up to a racist criminal justice system that is broken and perhaps more aptly described as terrorist. Hundreds more remain in Rikers right now in similar circumstances, having never been tried in court.

Walter Scott was killed by the police, shot in the back as he was running away. The officer's apparent attempt to cover it up was all thankfully caught on the cellphone camera of a passerby. It was yet another repulsive, shocking moment, begging the question "How many Walter Scotts were not videotaped? How many cover-ups go undiscovered? How many lives have been lost? How many decades has this been going on?" The realization that this is systemic and entrenched is shocking, overwhelming and incredibly upsetting. Further, the understanding that we are all complicit is becoming increasingly unavoidable of late.

"White privilege" is a term I've heard more in the past several months than in the past decade combined. With regularity I'm suddenly hearing discussions about America's entrenched system of "White supremacy." Some bristle at these terms, not feeling particularly "privileged" as they struggle to navigate their own life and career. In the past, I might acknowledge its existence on some level but I'd always give myself a pass. Sure, I could see that "white privilege" and "white supremacy" existed in some forms but it wasn't my doing. I was one of the good ones. I was part of the solution, not part of the problem.

But now I find myself examining my unwitting role in upholding America's vile and illusory system of "white male supremacy," if only by remaining silent. I am starting to acknowledge the ways -- big and small -- I have directly benefited. When I see black men terrorized by police policies and, in the most extreme cases, murdered; I never even remotely consider such an outcome for myself when I leave my home. I am a white male- free to navigate my neighborhood, my city, my life with a carefree ease (a privilege) that is not afforded my fellow citizens of color.

I have been a comedian for about 22 years. As a white male, I have undeniably been given advantages throughout that people of color and women are not afforded. Comedy clubs are largely owned and booked by white males. They decide who gets stage time, which then dictates who develops and progresses. Yes, of course you have to be funny, but white male voices are disproportionately nurtured and allowed room to grow. Additionally, bookers of TV shows are often male, almost always white. They are the gatekeepers, determining who progresses and gains exposure to a larger audience. Much of this can likely be attributed to the natural inclination to gravitate towards those who look like we do. Perhaps some of it can even be attributed to catering to certain "demographics." But it is racism/patriarchy and not calling it out allows it to continue un-scrutinized. It upholds the status quo.

When folks discuss great comedians they often reflexively mention men. I've seen many of today's top comedians ascend the ranks. I remember a time when they were not great. I remember when they were good. Over time, with lots of hard work, they became very good. With even more time and hard work, eventually they became great. Among the tops in their field. But you cannot discount the fact that their ascent and development were facilitated by a system that nurtures males- and specifically white males-at disproportionate rates.

I, too, have undoubtedly benefited from this system, consciously and unconsciously. I have been given opportunities that comedians of color and female comedians are not afforded as readily. I didn't face many of the hurdles that are placed before my fellow comedians who are female, people of color or LGBT. I can ignore my privilege and instead choose to stroke my ego with a narrative that I am special. I am some kind of superhero and I earned everything by working extraordinarily hard.

I have worked hard, but I cannot deny that as a white male I have occupied an elevated position of privilege in my field. This privilege not only facilitates the success of white males like myself, but perhaps even ensures it, to a certain extent. We all fall under its spell. Media chimes in to further the narrative, often using words like "Brilliant," "Genius" or "Renaissance man," to further convince us of how special and almost superhuman these men are.

In the past two weeks I've had the good fortune to work with two formidable and hilarious comedians. Last week I worked with Lizz Winstead (co-creator of The Daily Show) and this week I worked with Janeane Garofalo. These two comedians are giants; undeniable trailblazers with unique voices and a powerful presence. Yet the media does not fall all over itself to write stories about them or use words like "Genius" or "Brilliant" in the same way they do for their male counterparts. Women are routinely marginalized or outright ignored, not given their due. If women are written about, it's usually within the narrow narrative of "Are women funny?" It's lazy, tired and a passive form of violence.

Last week Jon Stewart was rightly hailed for his powerful reflection on the racist terrorist attack in Charleston. The clip has been shared all over social media and Stewart endlessly praised for the way he addressed the situation. But something troubled me about it. I couldn't help but wonder why, when a white male basically comes out and states the obvious, do people fall all over themselves to celebrate him? At a certain point the obsequious demonstration of praise seems overboard. Where, I wondered, are the black voices with a similar platform? The female voices? The people of color? Do we know where to find them? Do we care to look? Might this be a good time to hear from them? Have we all been conditioned to value and celebrate the white male perspective above all others, so that when he speaks up we can't stop praising him? Is what he did really so extraordinary?

Again, in no way am I discounting Stewart's considerable gifts and the fine job he did in this case and so many others. I think he is exceedingly talented and will be sorely missed when he leaves. But his should ideally be one of many voices in the media (and comedy) landscape that we are considering. Women and people of color have just as much to contribute (perhaps more at this particular time) to this vital national dialogue but aren't afforded an equal place at the table.

So it is time to look inward while processing and grieving a litany of injustices. Beyond the shadow of a doubt I am beginning to grasp the extent to which I enjoy white privilege/male privilege, and the ways that it's helped me get to where I am in life and in my career. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, it has made my path easier. I have been given opportunities to evolve and grow. Opportunities to fail. Acknowledging those truths is essential. It makes me more aware and empathic as I continue my path. It is an ongoing process, an ongoing education; and listening is always an essential part of that.

A seismic shift is afoot. We can either ignore it, deny it or examine our role in it. Many are beginning to ask "What can we do?" Perhaps we can start with a very difficult yet necessary examination of privilege, because it is the very building blocks of American racism and white supremacy. A system that results in dead black and brown bodies. I have an obligation to examine and ultimately use my privilege in ways that benefit and uplift those oppressed by white supremacy. I am one person. I want to honor those who have suffered and died by taking a hard and ongoing look at American white male supremacy and doing whatever I can to identify it, discredit it and hopefully, one day, help eliminate it.
This post was first published at TedAlexandro.tumblr.com.

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Lately anyone who is paying attention has been thunderstruck by the stark realization that racism is not only still alive in America but flourishing. And not only is it flourishing but it is doing so with the ongoing help of systems ostensibly put in place to protect all American citizens.

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A Los Angeles high school was the scene of a violent brawl between students and members of a group known for its vehemently anti-LGBT views.

On Tuesday, members of the Westboro Baptist Church staged a protest across the street from the Santee Education Complex in response to the school's recent installation of a gender-neutral restroom for students, according to the Associated Press.

A tour of the soon-to-be gender-neutral bathroom at @SanteeFalconsHS from Kween Robinson (@OfficialKween1) pic.twitter.com/g0IC5oSRgM
- Sonali Kohli (@Sonali_Kohli) April 13, 2016

After classes were dismissed, several students crossed the street to confront the Westboro protesters, who were carrying placards with homophobic messages like "homo sex is sin" and yelling from a bull horn. Some students began throwing objects at the protesters, according to The Los Angeles Times, and the dispute became physical.

Watch YouTube video footage of the incident below.

Although one student was briefly detained by local police, no one was seriously injured or arrested in the brawl, the Associated Press reports. Still, many of the school's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) students and supporters were left shaken by the incident, even while condemning the violence that ensued.

"I really thought that it was a really horrible thing that [the protesters] did, because they really hurt some people," one student told KTLA. Added another: "It's just a bathroom. People pee, so I mean...a bathroom's a bathroom."

Nonetheless, Principal Martin Gomez praised his students for the efforts in support of the gender-neutral restroom.

This sign is about to go up on a multi-stall bathroom at Santee Education Complex pic.twitter.com/dHsyT1uA8U
- Sonali Kohli (@Sonali_Kohli) April 13, 2016

"Yesterday, a small group of adults unsuccessfully attempted to discredit the brave actions of our students by protesting against the school's recently approved gender-neutral restrooms," Gomez said in a statement to the AP. "Above all, we want to ensure the safety of our students despite outside factors and influencers."

On Wednesday, a peaceful rally in support of Santee's LGBT students was held after classes let out for the day. Despite rumors that Westboro members were planning to return to the school that day, no protesters ever appeared.

Although violence is unacceptable under any circumstances, it's great to see students willing to stand up against anti-LGBT sentiment.

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Westboro's Protest Of A School's Gender-Neutral Restroom Turns Violent

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A Los Angeles high school was the scene of a violent brawl between students and members of a group known for its vehemently anti-LGBT views. On Tuesday, members of the Westboro Baptist Church staged a protest across the street from the Santee Education Complex in response to the school's recent installation of a gender-neutral restroom for students, according to the Associated Press.

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As likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton delivered a foreign policy speech in San Diego, California on Thursday, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump live tweeted, criticizing the former Secretary of State for reading from a teleprompter, something Trump rarely does.

"Crooked Hillary Clinton, who I would love to call Lyin' Hillary, is getting ready to totally misrepresent my foreign policy positions," Trump tweeted roughly two hours ahead of Clinton's speech.

Clinton did take aim at Trump throughout her speech.

"Donald Trump doesn't know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program," Clinton said, adding Trump has a bizarre fascination with dictators.

She mentioned that blowing up a golf course deal isn't how it works "in world affairs."

Clinton also suggested the U.S. doesn't need a leader who is constantly "blogging, mocking, [and] composing nasty tweets. I'm willing to bet he's writing a few right now."

She was right on that.

During Clinton's speech, Trump tweeted at least two times.

"Crooked Hillary no longer has credibility - too much failure in office. People will not allow another four years of incompetence!" Trump posted, and then added, "Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter! She doesn't even look presidential!"

Read More Stories About:

2016 Presidential Race, Big Government, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, teleprompter

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Donald Trump: Hillary Clinton Doesn't 'Look Presidential,'

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"Crooked Hillary Clinton, who I would love to call Lyin' Hillary, is getting ready to totally misrepresent my foreign policy positions," Trump tweeted roughly two hours ahead of Clinton's speech. Clinton did take aim at Trump throughout her speech.

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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/07/brock-turner-statement-stanford-rape-case-campus-culture

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The woman who was assaulted by former Stanford University student Brock Turner has received international attention for her powerful statement describing the trauma she and her family have experienced. One particularly compelling part of the victim's testimony is her anguish over Turner's refusal to express remorse and take responsibility for sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious - an attack that led a jury to convict him of three felonies.

The Guardian has since obtained a copy of Turner's full statement to judge Aaron Persky, who gave him a lenient sentence of six months in county jail, sparking widespread outrage and a recall campaign.

The letter from the former swimmer offers a close look at the many ways Turner has refused toeven acknowledgethat he assaulted the woman, despite the guilty verdicts, and has instead continued to place blame on a "party culture" of "drinking".

Although the victim and the prosecutor raised concerns about Turner's hollow apology and his continued unwillingness to admit that he committed an assault - despite overwhelming evidence that the woman was unconscious - the judge said this should not count against him at sentencing.

"I take him at his word that subjectively that's his version of his events," Persky said. "I'm not convinced that his lack of complete acquiescence to the verdict should count against him."

Turner's statement, along with many of his letters of support, provide insight into what activists describe as rape culture in the United States, meaning an environment in which assault and sexual violence is normalized and victims are blamed for being attacked.

In a phone interview on Tuesday, the victim said it was important for people to recognize the harms of Turner's statement.

"People need to know that this way of thinking is dangerous. It's threatening. More than my emotions, it's my safety, everyone else's safety. It's not just me feeling sad and defeated. It's honest fear."

She added: "The anger everyone is expressing has so many levels of being hurt and feeling that fear. Anger is how a lot of us are expressing it, but it comes from a place of pain. It's unacceptable. There's no way you can wiggle out of this."

Below, the Guardian has published a portion of Turner's statement that illustrates, as the victim described in her original statement, the ways in which Turner "failed to exhibit sincere remorse or responsibility for his conduct".

_________
The night of January 17th changed my life and the lives of everyone involved forever. I can never go back to being the person I was before that day. I am no longer a swimmer, a student, a resident of California, or the product of the work that I put in to accomplish the goals that I set out in the first nineteen years of my life. Not only have I altered my life, but I've also changed [redacted] and her family's life. I am the sole proprietor of what happened on the night that these people's lives were changed forever. I would give anything to change what happened that night. I can never forgive myself for imposing trauma and pain on [redacted]. It debilitates me to think that my actions have caused her emotional and physical stress that is completely unwarranted and unfair. The thought of this is in my head every second of every day since this event has occurred. These ideas never leave my mind. During the day, I shake uncontrollably from the amount I torment myself by thinking about what has happened. I wish I had the ability to go back in time and never pick up a drink that night, let alone interact with [redacted]. I can barely hold a conversation with someone without having my mind drift into thinking these thoughts. They torture me. I go to sleep every night having been crippled by these thoughts to the point of exhaustion. I wake up having dreamt of these horrific events that I have caused. I am completely consumed by my poor judgement and ill thought actions. There isn't a second that has gone by where I haven't regretted the course of events I took on January 17th/18th. My shell and core of who I am as a person is forever broken from this. I am a changed person. At this point in my life, I never want to have a drop of alcohol again. I never want to attend a social gathering that involves alcohol or any situation where people make decisions based on the substances they have consumed. I never want to experience being in a position where it will have a negative impact on my life or someone else's ever again. I've lost two jobs solely based on the reporting of my case. I wish I never was good at swimming or had the opportunity to attend Stanford, so maybe the newspapers wouldn't want to write stories about me. All I can do from these events moving forward is by proving to everyone who I really am as a person. I know that if I were to be placed on probation, I would be able to be a benefit to society for the rest of my life. I want to earn a college degree in any capacity that I am capable to do so. And in accomplishing this task, I can make the people around me and society better through the example I will set. I've been a goal oriented person since my start as a swimmer. I want to take what I can from who I was before this situation happened and use it to the best of my abilities moving forward. I know I can show people who were like me the dangers of assuming what college life can be like without thinking about the consequences one would potentially have to make if one were to make the same decisions that I made. I want to show that people's lives can be destroyed by drinking and making poor decisions while doing so. One needs to recognize the influence that peer pressure and the attitude of having to fit in can have on someone. One decision has the potential to change your entire life. I know I can impact and change people's attitudes towards the culture surrounded by binge drinking and sexual promiscuity that protrudes through what people think is at the core of being a college student. I want to demolish the assumption that drinking and partying are what make up a college lifestyle I made a mistake, I drank too much, and my decisions hurt someone. But I never ever meant to intentionally hurt [redacted]. My poor decision making and excessive drinking hurt someone that night and I wish I could just take it all back. If I were to be placed on probation, I can positively say, without a single shred of doubt in my mind, that I would never have any problem with law enforcement. Before this happened, I never had any trouble with law enforcement and I plan on maintaining that. I've been shattered by the party culture and risk taking behavior that I briefly experienced in my four months at school. I've lost my chance to swim in the Olympics. I've lost my ability to obtain a Stanford degree. I've lost employment opportunity, my reputation and most of all, my life. These things force me to never want to put myself in a position where I have to sacrifice everything. I would make it my life's mission to show everyone that I can contribute and be a positive influence on society from these events that have transpired. I will never put myself through an event where it will give someone the ability to question whether I really can be a betterment to society. I want no one, male or female, to have to experience the destructive consequences of making decisions while under the influence of alcohol. I want to be a voice of reason in a time where people's attitudes and preconceived notions about partying and drinking have already been established. I want to let young people now, as I did not, that things can go from fun to ruined in just one night.

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Brock Turner's statement blames sexual assault on Stanford 'party culture'

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The woman who was assaulted by former Stanford University student Brock Turner has received international attention for her powerful statement describing the trauma she and her family have experienced. One particularly compelling part of the victim's testimony is her anguish over Turner's refusal to express remorse and take responsibility for sexually assaulting her while she was unconscious - an attack that led a jury to convict him of three felonies.

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Act Like A Women Box

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hmWCH3JXqU

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Breaking down gender barriers

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/allison-lantagne/gender-roles-media_b_5326199.html

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Media plays a large role in creating social norms, because various forms of media, including advertisements, television, and film, are present almost everywhere in current culture. Gender roles, as an example, exist solely because society as a whole chooses to accept them, but they are perpetuated by the media. Conspicuous viewers must be aware of what the media is presenting to them, and make sure they're not actively participating in a culture of oppression.

Even on young children, gender roles are being pushed through advertisements. My search for American advertisements with girls playing with action figures and boys using easy-bake ovens was fruitless, and even when I moved to a gender neutral product, sidewalk chalk, the advertisement was sending different messages towards boys versus girls. The girls were all coloring on the sidewalk, as the one young boy rapped, ending in a short dance routine where it was clear that the only male in the advertisement was the main character. Are consumers of sidewalk chalk actively trying to send this message of submission to their 9-year-old girls? Likely not, but the media is sending them the message without being stopped. However, Tide, a Proctor and Gamble laundry detergent, has taken its advertisement in a better direction, recently showing a clip where the leading male actor proudly proclaims "I'm a stay-at-home dad," and later goes on to braid his daughter's hair. By showing a man playing out typically "feminine" behaviors, Tide is promoting a more equal society.

Television is the most pervasive form of media, with 96.7 percent of American families owning a TV, according to The Nielsen Company, which takes TV set ownership into account when it produces ratings. This, of course, means that viewers must carefully examine the content of the programs they choose to watch, and decide if they can ethically support and promote said content.

For example, The Big Bang Theory, in its earlier seasons, had only one consistently present female lead -- Penny, played by the lovely Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting. Penny's character was that of the stereotypical female: the ditzy, attractive neighbor, who existed solely to create sexual tension between herself and one of the show's leading men, Leonard Hofstadter. As the show progressed, the characters developed and more females were introduced, but Sweeting's character still exists primarily to create romantic tension.

A better example of female representation in television can be found in the American version of the TV show The Office, which had five consistent female leads -- Pam Beesly-Halpert, Angela Martin, Phyllis Lapin-Vance, Meredith Palmer and Kelly Kapoor. There is a strong, working-class female represented in each department of the fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin, and all of these female characters are dynamic. Even though some of them did portray female gender roles, such as the character of Kelly being emotional, the characters were given enough development and background to be more than just stereotypes. The Office worked against the unfortunate statistic that men outnumber women in television two to one, and gave viewers a plethora of strong females in the workplace, helping to move the media to more accurately represent the real world, where women are 51 percent.

Film is less pervasive than television, which means consumers must be even more particular when choosing movies to support. Every $8 movie ticket tells the film industry to produce more movies like the ones viewers have paid to see, which is why it is disappointing that Grown Ups 2, directed by Dennis Dugan, grossed about $200,000,000 more than The Call, directed by Brad Anderson. Only about a quarter of the cast of Grown Ups 2 is female, and the movie doesn't pass the Bechdel test, a test created by Alison Bechdel, which asks only three questions: Does the piece have two or more female characters? Do they speak to each other? Do they speak of topics other than men? Although the movie has stars such as Maya Rudolph and Salma Hayek, the female characters don't have a conversation about anything other than men. The Call, starring Halle Berry and Abigail Breslin, features a strong female lead (Halle Berry) who saves a young girl (Abigail Breslin) after being kidnapped by a character played by Michael Eklund, but grossed significantly less. The message consumers are sending to filmmakers is that they should produce more films with women falling into the resigned, quiet, gender role, as opposed to films that break away from these molds.

There's nothing wrong with accepting gender roles. For example, I want to be a stay-at-home mom, but this is a personal choice, not something that I feel society or tradition is forcing me to do. The problem with gender roles is that they can cross a line and become oppressive. If a young woman wants to become a doctor, and a young man a teacher, it is the rest of the world's responsibility not to bat an eye. If a doctor can cure the sick, what does gender matter? If a teacher can educate a student, who are we to deny the pupil the right to learn, solely on the grounds of the sex of his or her teacher? If a man wants to cry, let him cry. Men feel just as women do.

Although the media isn't yet representing either gender void of stereotypes, a societal change will bring about a change in the media. Regardless of this, gender roles are just that, roles. It is up to the individual to decide whether or not they are going to fill them. The best advice that can be given is to make sure, above all else, that you are fulfilling a role you want to be fulfilling, regardless of where it fits in society's set of theoretical constructs.

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Media plays a large role in creating social norms, because various forms of media, including advertisements, television, and film, are present almost everywhere in current culture. Gender roles, as an example, exist solely because society as a whole chooses to accept them, but they are perpetuated by the media.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CODEBYU3xRg

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Bruce Jenner doesn't deserve to be a woman? Addressing some of the comments about Bruce Jenner from radical feminists and others who not accepting of transgender people. Get my awesome tshirts! http://www.jaclynglenn.com Be my patreon!