Blacks v. Feminists

"Women's Lib Has No Soul." So proclaims the cover of the latest issue of Encore, the black newsmagazine. Inside, an essay by Psychologist Rose Finkenstaedt condemns the feminist movement as "little more than the hysterical exhibitionism of spoiled children." To blacks, adds Editor-Publisher Ida Lewis, Women's Lib is merely "a playtoy for middle-class white women." At first reading, Encore's broadside sounds too extreme to reflect the outlook of more than a few blacks. But in interviews with TIME correspondents across the nation last week, many black women agreed with the magazine's stand. Although black women are perhaps the most oppressed members of their sex, they are generally the least enthusiastic about Women's Liberation.

Black women have a simple explanation for their coolness toward the feminist movement--they believe that they are oppressed not by black men but by white society. As a result, most of them prefer to confine their crusading to such basic questions as employment, housing, education and the psychological effects of discrimination. "To black women," Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm sums up, "picketing a club restricted to men or insisting on the title Ms. are not burning issues."

Even the more important Women's Lib causes, such as abortions on request or the Equal Rights Amendment, fail to stir the black community. To many blacks, explains Jean Noble, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women, "abortion is genocidal, a method of limiting the black population. Muslim groups, for instance, say that the role of the black woman is to produce warriors for the revolution." Of the Equal Rights Amendment, Noble says, "I call it the liftin' and totin' bill. More than half of the black women with jobs work in service occupations; if the amendment becomes law, we will be the ones liftin' and totin', so passage of ERA is not our first priority."

Black women also find it difficult to identify with a movement that is essentially a middle-and upper-middle-class phenomenon. Florynce Kennedy, one of a number of blacks who belong to the feminist group NOW, points out that a vast number of blacks still exist close to the poverty level or even below it. Snaps Black Actress Val Gray: "I can't address myself to the problems of a woman in Highland Park [a white, upper-middle-class Chicago suburb] when she is trying to get out of her kitchen and I'm in her kitchen as a maid."

Sheila Young, executive editor of Essence magazine, agrees. "We haven't had the comforts to get tired of. We haven't had the big house or the country club to bore us." In fact, when black women express discontent with their female roles, it is often because they already have more liberation than they want. They tend, however, to call it responsibility, since they frequently work not by choice but out of the need to support their families.

That necessity has actually brought black women some of the things for which white feminists are still fighting. Blacks, for instance, have never believed that woman's place is in the home. "I was not raised to be somebody's wife," says the chairman of New York City's Commission on Human Rights, Eleanor Holmes Norton. "I was raised to do something with my life." Since black men are already accustomed to assertive women, she says, blacks have "very much of a head start on egalitarian family life."

An even more important cause of black alienation from Women's Lib may be the distrust, if not outright dislike, of many black women for white females. For one thing, black women are furious with whites for "stealing" their men, as evidenced by the rising total of marriages between black men and white women. Besides, black women see no reason to believe that a society in which white females held positions of power would be any fairer to blacks than a system dominated by white males.

Some blacks charge that white feminists have already shown evidence of unconscious racism. Althea Scott, a Los Angeles radiology technician who tries to work with feminists to "keep a dialogue going," nevertheless demands to know "how a liberated woman can rush to a meeting leaving her black maid at home to look after the children, get there and look around and ask, 'But where are all our black sisters?' " Editor Lewis sees the Women's Lib movement as nothing more than "a family quarrel between white women and white men." She cautions that outsiders who interfere in family disputes "always get shafted when the dust settles."

Not all blacks are hostile to Women's Lib. Some black members of NOW generally agree with Florynce Kennedy's argument that "it's the same gig wherever you are. Whether you're fighting for Women's Liberation or just black liberation, you're fighting the same enemies." The editors of Essence are even more feminist in outlook. "There will be no positive change for any of us," they declared not long ago, "until certain basic institutions of our society are changed. Which is all the more reason why the black woman can ill afford to become the silent woman, content with cooking soul food and making incoherent baby talk at the dinner table in the name of black manhood." Most black women do not take issue with that view. But, like Chicago Poet Gwendolyn Brooks, they do not believe that ardent feminism is the logical alternative. Says Brooks: "Today's black men, at last flamingly assertive and proud, need their black women beside them, not organizing against them."

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