ABSTRACT
In the early 1970s, many black feminists began to voice dissatisfaction with existing liberation movements. They criticized the mainstream women’s liberation movement’s myopia and began to develop organizations designed to address the dual, often multiple, forms of oppression that affected their own lives.1 They were also seeking alternative routes to racial liberation, free from the sexism of many contemporary black nationalist organizations.2 Black feminist groups like the National Black Feminist Organization and its offspring, the Combahee River Collective, sought more synthetic analyses of power than these liberation movements provided, analyses that accounted for not just sexism or racism, but the ways these two forms of oppression reinforced one another. Black feminist concerns and activism did not end there: In 1977, the Combahee River Collective produced a “Black Feminist Statement,” which explained the group’s genesis from an early concern with antiracist and antisexist politics to a more “politically developed” concern with capitalist oppression and heterosexism (Sheftal, 234). When a group of radical women of color articulated their particular feminist identities and revolutionary vision in an enormously influential 1981 book, This Bridge Called My Back, several essayists also addressed their oppression as lesbians.
