Separate Roads to Feminism
Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America's Second Wave

The development of the era known as the 'second wave' of US feminist protest.

Benita Roth (Author)

9780521822602, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 December 2003

288 pages, 5 tables
23.7 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.5 kg

'… a major contribution to the study of second-wave feminism in the United States … the rhetorical and stylistic clarity of the writing … provides a very useful and stimulating insight into how to reconcile the structural strain which prevails in American social movement theory …'. Cercles

This examines the emergence of feminist movements from the Civil Rights/Black Liberation movement, the Chicano movement, and the white left in the 1960s and 1970s. The author argues that the 'second wave' was comprised of feminisms: organizationally distinct movements that influenced each other in complex ways. The making of second wave feminisms resulted from decisions that feminists made about their political choices given constraints that affected their activism. These constraints were placed on them by structural inequalities that militated against unity among feminists from different racial/ethnic communities; by loyalties that feminists, particularly feminists of color, felt to other members of their movement communities; and by the necessity of making political decisions within a competitive and complex extra-institutional oppositional milieu.

Preface/Acknowledgments
Introduction: the emergence and development of feminism along racial and ethnic lines in the 1960s and 1970s
1. To whom do you refer? structure and the situated feminist
2. The 'fourth world' is born: intra-movement experience, oppositional political communities and the emergence of the white women's liberation movement
3. The vanguard center: intra-movement experience and the emergence of black feminism
4. Las Feministas: intra-movement experience and the emergence of chicana feminism
5. Organizing one's own: the competitive social movement sector and the rise of organizationally different feminist movements
Conclusion: revisiting and 're-visioning' second-wave feminisms
Appendix: interviews and oral histories.

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH], Ethnic studies [JFSL], Gender studies: women [JFSJ1], Gender studies, gender groups [JFSJ], Regional studies [GTB]