how we get free by keeanga yamahtta taylor

The Combahee Statement obliterated that premise. As it was explained to me, feminists saw the world as divided between men and women and not between classes. I had been a socialist since I was fourteen, and, in the groups that I had become active with, feminism was always painted as hostile to socialism. The first was its effort to combine socialist politics with feminism. Reading the statement for the first time, two things struck me.

from those groups was the explanatory power of their statement, which was first collected in Zillah Eisenstein’s anthology “ Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism,” in 1978. In many ways, they built on the work of the Third World Women’s Alliance, which was an outgrowth of the Black Women’s Liberation Committee-a caucus of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. were not the first to break with white feminist and Black-nationalist organizations. saw themselves as revolutionaries whose aspirations far exceeded women’s rights: they aspired to the overthrow of capitalism.

They were also inspired by the national liberation and anti-colonial movements, from the Algerian struggle against the French occupation to the Vietnamese resistance to the American war. But they were not only reacting to the deficits they found in organizations led by white women and Black men. Equally dismayed by the direction of the feminist movement, which they believed to be dominated by middle-class white women, and the suffocating masculinity in Black-nationalist organizations, they set out to formulate their own politics and strategies in response to their distinct experiences as Black women. We had been reading about divisions within the feminist movement in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, and the emergence of a body of thought captured in the framework of “Black feminism.” The Combahee River Collective was a small organization, but it involved some of the luminaries of Black feminism: Barbara Smith and her twin sister, Beverly Smith, as well as Demita Frazier, Cheryl Clarke, Akasha Hull, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Chirlane McCray, and Audre Lorde. I first encountered the Combahee River Collective Statement in a women’s-studies class, my second year of college at SUNY Buffalo.

How we get free by keeanga yamahtta taylor