Introduction: The Intermovement Level and Feminist Emergences

In the previous three chapters, I have narrated the emergences of feminist movements from different racial/ethnic communities such that it might be hard for the reader to imagine that feminists would have had any choice but to form organizationally distinct movements. Since left feminist movements came from other social movements, and since “recruitment to a movement follows the lines of pre-existing social relationships,” the existence of organizationally distinct feminisms organized along racial/ethnic lines seems to have been “natural,” and inevitable (Gerlach and Hine 1970:44). But the commonalities that feminists shared with those in their parent movements were not straitjackets. It was also the case that there were contacts among emerging feminists in different racial/ethnic communities, and that there was cross-pollination of ideas about gender liberation. The 1960s and 1970s were years in which social movement politics were fluid and fast-changing; when new constituencies of activists emerged and agitated; when long-standing social injustices and cultural mores were challenged, sometimes successfully; and when people did, at various times, meet and work with those of other classes and races. Many white feminists encountered and emulated Black Civil Rights activists in that movement (Evans 1979) and continued to stay abreast of developments in that movement; a number of Black feminists had relationships with white feminists, with Black women represented in the ranks and among the leadership of the National Organization for Women (NOW) (A. C. Hernández, interview 2000; Marx Ferree and Hess 1994); and as argued in Chapter Four Chicana feminists were sympathetic to a large part of the “Anglo” feminist agenda, if not to white feminists themselves (Orozco 1976).