The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement

by Winifred Breines

Inspired by the idealism of the civil rights movement, the women who launched the radical second wave of the feminist movement believed, as a bedrock principle, in universal sisterhood and color-blind democracy. Their hopes, however, were soon dashed. To this day, the failure to create an integrated movement remains a sensitive and contested issue. In The Trouble Between Us, Winifred Breines explores why a racially integrated women's liberation movement did not develop in the United States.

Drawing on flyers, letters, newspapers, journals, institutional records, and oral histories, Breines dissects how white and black women's participation in the movements of the 1960s led to the development of separate feminisms. Herself a participant in these events, Breines attempts to reconcile the explicit professions of anti-racism by white feminists with the accusations of mistreatment, ignorance, and neglect by African American feminists. Many radical white women, unable to see beyond their own experiences and idealism, often behaved in unconsciously or abstractly racist ways, despite their passionately anti-racist stance and hard work to develop an interracial movement. As Breines argues, however, white feminists' racism is not the only reason for the absence of an interracial feminist movement. Segregation, black women's interest in the Black Power movement, class differences, and the development of identity politics with an emphasis on "difference" were all powerful factors that divided white and black women.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s white feminists began to understand black feminism's call to include race and class in gender analyses, and black feminists began to give white feminists some credit for their political work. Despite early setbacks, white and black radical feminists eventually developed cross-racial feminist political projects. Their struggle to bridge the racial divide provides a model for all Americans in a multiracial society.

Genres: Feminism, History, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Race, Sociology, American History

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read it for school. The subject is really interesting but the writer is really repetitive. I kept reading a paragraph and getting distracted, thinking, "didn't I read this same paragraph like a few pages ago?" Additionally, I do feel that the author is kind of biased and did this project to validate her own experiences in the movements, and I do feel that the text favored the white perspective. And perhaps this is just my own thing, but I was kind of bored by the narrow focus on the white socialist feminist movement. It just seemed like such a small subset of the more meaningful larger picture.

I wonder if there isn't a better written, more comprehensive book on the subject. I didn't hate this book and I think it's an important topic, but I didn't love reading it and I wouldn't have read it outside of school.

[Teri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of essays by Winifred Breines and the role of women in the feminist movement of the 1960s through the 1980s. Breines follows a chronological history of feminists beginning with white women and African-American women's roles in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and how these two groups of women forged their own campaign for equal rights. Breines also details the role of African-American women in the Black Power movement, specifically detailing specific leaders with the Black Panthers. Two other groups are noted, the Bread and Roses group and Combahee River Collective. These groups were socialist feminist group, the former a white oriented group and the latter an African-American group. The Bread and Roses organization was anti-capitalist and anti-racial, hoping to be inclusive of all women of race. The divide between the two races continued into these organizations that began in the days of SNCC. The author then wraps up her discussion as she details the issues in Boston in the 1970s and 1980s when many African-American women were being killed. Women of all colors began to come together to fight capitalism, racism, and sexism.

Well written, scholarly work discussing the oppression of women during the anti-war and New Left movement era. The overriding theme is that solidarity is power and should cross race and class lines.

[Jeanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Why didn’t a multiracial women’s liberation movement develop in the United States?” This is the question that Winifred Breines attempts to answer in her book The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement. The question is an ambitious one, and Breines ultimately stops short of answering it completely. Breines narrows her history to second-wave socialist feminism, and refutes claims made by scholars such as Dorothy Sue Cobble, Silke Roth, and Kimberly Springer that racism existed within the predominately white feminist movement. She tells the story of white socialist feminists from the 1960s to the 1980s who attempt to forge inter-racial activist connections with black women, but fail due to black women’s resistance. Breines gives a self-segregation argument whereby some black women did not simply refuse to engage in what white women called “feminist” work. Instead, they completed their own activist work and generated a politics separately from white feminists while refusing to self-identify as “feminist.” These black activists strived for an identity politics based on difference, not integration, and claimed that white feminists were so privileged that they only analyzed discrimination based on sex/gender, not race and class. Breines counters this point by demonstrating how Bread and Roses, a predominately white, anti-capitalist, socialist second-wave feminist group in Boston, worked consciously on issues concerning race. But as a former member of Bread and Roses and as a feminist advocating for intersections between race, class, and sex/gender, Breines tells this history from a particular standpoint epistemology. Her bias colors her main argument, which puts white women at the center and implies that the black feminists were racist for wanting to self-segregate. Despite this deeply problematic bias, Breines’ book is an important scholarly addition to a historical topic fraught with tension.

[Melissa]

Read this for two different papers I'm writing on second wave feminism and this was so interesting and well-done! How inclusive was this wave of feminism? This is a really fascinating topic for me since it's still often a point of contention (particularly after reading Gloria Steinem's recent memoir), and such a complex and nuanced issue.

[Jaclyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting. Good to read shortly after Benita Roth's. It read like a dissertation, which it was. I found the chapters on Boston particularly interesting, especially the bit about the 1981 NEWSA conference and subsequent gathering at Storrs.

[Charlie Morrighan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Annie Jarman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an incredibly thorough reexamination of the depiction of second-wave feminism as isolated to middle-class white women. The author makes the case that white feminists in the 1960s wanted to be antiracist and made overtures to black feminist groups, but their belief that mutual experiences of sexism would create a global sisterhood reflected their ignorance of the intersection of race and gender in black women's lives. As a result, black feminism flourished separately from white feminism and dealt with its own complications of black nationalism, sexism within male-led black power movements, and disagreement with aspects of white feminism. In the 1970s, white feminist groups realized their responsibility to educate themselves and attended diversity workshops. Once white feminists understood the intersectionality of race and gender, the groups were able to work together on a variety of issues like sex-based violence, although they also continued to diverge in noticeable ways for issues specific to their community.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Emily Mayo · Rating 3 out of 5]

had to log this one on Goodreads so I would actually finish reading it for class. the class hated it, if you were wondering

Place I associate viscerally with this book: STRUGGLING to get through this on my bed, which is not a productive place to be reading anything for school if you want to understand it

[Mills College Library]

305.42097 B8353 2006