ABSTRACT
Black liberation and women's liberation as movements, blacks and white women as people, will fight together. The women had to respond to the pull of the gravity of the black civil rights movement. During the 1890s chapters of the National American Woman Suffrage Association were organized in the South despite rigid regional resistance. The relationship between black rights and woman's rights offers an important cautionary tale, revealing to us the tangle of sex, race, and politics in America. The racism of white women dictates more than a desire to dominate something; it also bears on her participation in what Eldredge Cleaver calls 'the funky facts of life'. Before the Civil War nearly all feminists were fierce abolitionists; during the Civil War they willingly stopped their arduous work on their own behalf. One current optimistic theory sees all the oppressed classes of America joining together to storm the citadel of their oppressor.
