Feminism as Racist Backlash: How Racism Drove the Development of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Feminist Theory

Abstract

American feminism’s anti-Black racism is often presented as a failure of white feminists to integrate Black women into their movement. This historiographic approach presumes that feminism was a progressive movement that merely suffered from blind spots in its approach to women’s rights due to the biases of some white women. Unlike previous research which has pointed out the individual racism of suffragettes and mid-twentieth-century feminists, this chapter argues for an understanding of the theories created and endorsed by feminists from 1860 to 1980 as the consequence of feminism’s dependence on racist theories predicated on research from ethnologists and evolutionary theorists in the nineteenth and criminologists in the twentieth centuries. By looking at the primary racial target of feminist thought and activism over the centuries, the Black male, I argue scholars can more accurately trace the theories feminists used to derail Black American’s struggle for civil rights.