Quote: (02-17-2013 03:20 PM)houston Wrote:
Athlone, why do you say feminism is a white womans thing?
Because it responds to problems that are primarily those of white women. Or, I should say more specifically, western white women.
The core of the feminist movement is its opposition to "traditional gender roles". In essence, feminism began as a movement designed to challenge the notion that a woman's place was in the home and nowhere else. It sought to show that women could be successful outside the home as professionals and thinkers, while also making the case that women could and should have a say on matters that go on outside their kitchens (ex: the right to vote).
The thing is that these problems are, for the most part, white ones, specifically white western ones. Whereas western white women fought during the first and second waves of feminism to carve out roles outside the home, black and native American women had been doing that for centuries.
In Africa, women had long labored outside the home. Whereas European gender roles often restricted women from performing labor crucial to society's sustenance (ex: working in the fields), african women had long had a crucial role in their society's economic sustainability. They, unlike European women, exerted direct influence on the production and transport of food and in other forms of labor.
Native American women (ancestors of the majority of hispanics we know today) were doing the same. It was very common throughout Native America for women to perform all kinds of agricultural and other forms of manual labor in their communities. When you study the "civilizing" missions attempted by Anglo-Americans during the 19th century and read up on things like the Lewis and Clark journals, you'll see that this was a key bone of contention. The fact that Native American women were performing actual labor was considered by white Americans to be evidence of their savagery. Meriwether Lewis thought it ridiculous that Native American women he met were sometimes seen performing acts of "drudgery" he considered improper for women, and took this as a sign that Native cultures did not respect their women.
You would see this emphasized in American Indian "education" policy, whereby Native Americans were forced onto reservations or into boarding schools to be "civilized". This civilization was based on the notion that they would adopt traditional European gender roles-their men would stop hunting and start farming, while their women would stop farming and start sewing.
From a "feminist" perspective, Europeans actually brought Native American women backwards. They were already "liberated"-they did not need white women to tell them how to find this liberation.
Native American and African women also often lived in matrilineal societies. Whereas European women long existed in a society that saw their marriage to a man as essentially a forfeiture of their economic and social independence, African women could maintain much of this due to matrilineal organizations that gave them greater control over family life and their childrens' future.
You see this continued in the new world. Black women in the Americas, like Native Americans before them, spent centuries during and after slavery working outside of what Europeans would consider "traditional gender roles". White western women were often shielded from serious work and protected in the home-these same women would be the ones to kick off the feminist movement and begin asking for more responsibility outside the home. Black women already had this, as did Native American and some South Asian women.
Feminism also called for an end to the patriarchy and the dominance of men over women. As the first video I posted shows, it simply isn't all that easy for black female history to resonate with this. Black men haven't had true dominion over their women for centuries. In Africa, the black man often had polygamy and certainly plenty of authority, but he also often dealt with matrilineal lines of social organization that limited his dominion and influence.
In the new world, the black man was essentially a pack horse. He had no real power to keep his family together (it could be split apart at anytime should an owner choose), and he also had no power to guard the sexuality of his women. He had no status or power relative to the white men who largely took dominion over the sexual capacity of the black female. They kept black women as mistresses or concubines and quite frequently impregnated them with very little opposition. Black men had no real power to stop their wives, sisters or daughters from being used in this way or sold indiscriminately. They had no control over black female mobility or sexuality.
Thus, when white women (whose sexuality was quite firmly restricted by their men) come out and complained about freeing themselves from the "oppressive" control their men had over their sexuality, it becomes difficult for blacks to interpret things in the same way. Black men have not historically controlled black women that way, and they also have not prevented black women from seeking roles outside the home (black men didn't have the money to fund the stay-at-home mom lifestyle so many white women felt "oppressed" by during the mid-century prior to the second wave feminist explosion in the 60's). So how can black women adopt this narrative?
They can't, really. Neither can Native American women or many south asian women.
Also (lest you think this is strictly a white vs. non-white dynamic I'm trying to establish here), many Eastern European white women of today can't adopt the western feminist narrative either because communism also saw them "liberated" from traditional gender roles.
While white women in the UK and USA were busy talking about their oppressive restriction to the home and their desire to do all the things men can do, Soviet women were
on the frontlines putting bullets in Nazi heads. Eastern European women were
entering male realms of society (serving as combat pilots, combat troops, tank gunners, and also working in factories even after the war) earlier and in greater numbers than women elsewhere.
Thus, when white western feminists started going on and on about the need to be liberated from "traditional gender roles", you could imagine that such calls had less pull in the east. These women had already had a greater taste of liberation than any western women had at that point, and possibly greater than western women have today (how many females do we have serving as frontline combat troops and snipers in the US military?). They simply don't have the same urgent need for that narrative, and many have probably already learned enough about it through experience to know that it has serious pitfalls.
To these and other women (Africans, Native Americans, and some Asians), traditional gender roles might not even seem quite so harmful. Some may even associate less traditional roles with oppression and/or racism (ex: black women could argue that they were forced to work more than white women due to their race and due to the limited earning potential of their men thanks to racism, and that white status as housewives was a sign of privilege). To them, the white western feminist perspective is simply not as easy to understand much less fight for.
Long story short, feminism as we know it today is a middle/upper-class white, western female thing. Its focus on minimizing the value of traditional gender roles is founded on the status those women have historically enjoyed as the most well-protected and privileged women in history, and it is designed largely to serve problems that resonate with that experience. Other women can have "feminisms" of their own, but they would be fundamentally different from the kind of feminism we most commonly see here in the west, especially in the way they treat traditional gender roles.
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