Writing the Way to Feminism

Bibliographic Data

ID2222947
AuthorsE Townsend-Bell (0000-0002-9164-4260, corresponding author), Erica E Townsend-Bell
Year2012
Volume38
Issue1
Pages127-152
Publication date2012-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSigns: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-9740 • E-ISSN: 1545-6943
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/665806
OpenAlexW2175453866
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited14

Recent works indicate that minority feminist organizing was much more widespread, and began much earlier, than the traditional historiographies have credited, yet these new developments have not overturned an understanding of the 1980s as the decade of multiracial feminist organizing. If sustained and multifaceted minority feminist activism was occurring in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, is a characterization of the 1980s as the era of multiracial feminism still accurate? I employ a comparative historical and content analysis of writings from the late 1960s through the 1980s to determine what, if any, important distinctions occurred between those two time periods. I find that writing was an important mechanism for communication and debate in the 1970s and the 1980s, but there were significant differences in terms of the locations in which the writing occurred and, by extension, the source of editorial control over said writing. The issue of racial solidarity dominated the race-movement and white-feminist-controlled spaces of many 1970s publications, and thus limited the conversation, primarily because the locations drove audience and content, restricting coverage to those themes deemed relevant to a nonminority feminist audience. In contrast, the hallmark of autonomous women of color’s writings of the 1970s and 1980s was the freedom associated with independently controlled publishing spaces that provided more physical space for debate, as well as the autonomy to engage those themes deemed most relevant to them. It was this autonomy, combined with political changes that allowed for a concentrated focus on feminist alliances, that merits a designation of the 1980s as the decade of multiracial feminism

Autonomy · Conversation · Feminism · Feminist movement · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · White (mutation) · American Political and Social Dynamics · Gender Studies · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

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