Civil Rights and Women

What was the relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement?

As Benita Roth argues in her book, Separate Roads to Feminism, the Second Wave Feminism was a result of ‘simultaneous emergence in 1968 of white and black feminist groups’ which evolved into one cohesive movement. She argues that there were two main origins, one rooted in groups such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), and the other ‘came out of the Civil Rights and New Left movements’, with the later having the greatest strength.

Whilst there were a great deal of female black feminists, second wave feminism was largely a white female dominated movement, and was a direct result of white female student involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and activism within the New Left. For female white student volunteers in the Civil Rights Movement, in projects such as SNCC’s Freedom Summer their experiences ‘catalyzed a new feminist consciousness’.

First of all, white women stepped away from the traditional patriarchal American family and society, and into the black culture where there were many strong women who ‘shattered cultural images of appropriate “female” behaviour’. For many white students, this was an awakening of female strength, and allowed them to compare the role of women in white society, and discover the inequality evident within it. Secondly, on projects like Freedom Summer, white women had to strip away ‘the social supports of white society, calling upon reserves of strength they had not known that they possessed.’ In this environment, the white students ‘developed a sense of self’.

White women also became involved with a movement where there was already emerging feminism. Black women had already rebelled against the stereotypical gender roles of the women in SNCC doing administrative work in the spring of 1964. Evans argues that ‘Black women struck the first blow for female equality in SNCC. Their half-serious rebellion…signalled their rising power...