How and why feminist movements emerged in the “second wave” of American feminism is the subject of this book. My interest in this subject was prompted by lacunae in the literature on feminists of color in the second wave, but also by personal experiences. I started college in the Boston area at the end of the 1970s and was active in feminist circles there until I left Massachusetts in 1984. Throughout that period, racism within the (white) feminist movement was an inescapable issue, and racial division among feminists was the subject of many discussions and workshops. Over and over, in group after group, the failure of white feminism to attract women of color – often characterized as the failure of women of color to be attracted to feminism – was bemoaned. In my own experience, the activist women of color that I met in those years (and since) did not seem any less “feminist” in their politics, and they were not hostile to feminist issues. But they were reluctant to participate in all-white groups, fearing tokenism, and they maintained that educating white women about white racism was just too hard. Many then went on to argue that white feminist organizations were generally irrelevant to the kind of social change they envisioned.