Reviews

Dayna Tortorici

Can enemy feminists become comrades?

In 1979, in her closing address at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Lawrence, Kansas, the feminist Barbara Smith tried to persuade a room full of white women that racism was a roadblock to “making feminism real.” In her six years in the movement as “an avowed Black feminist,” Smith said, she had seen some promising developments. Feminists had formed study groups dedicated to the problem of racism; women of color were appearing more frequently in movement journals. But despite early signs of “real and equal coalitions” between white women and women of color, white women still seemed to think that taking responsibility for their racism was something they did as a favor to someone else, “solely to benefit Third World women.” Smith insisted this was not the case. “Racism is a feminist issue,” she said, and anyone in the audience who doubted it (“ ‘Oh no,’ I can hear some of you groaning inwardly. ‘Not that again’ ”) need look no further than “the inherent definition of feminism”:

Feminism is the political theory and practice that struggles to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, disabled women, lesbians, old women — as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Anything less than this vision of total freedom is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement .

Smith followed this memorable line by naming another roadblock to feminist victory: third-world women’s antifeminism, which was “fueled by a history of justified distrust.” In her appeal to women of color not to reject feminism wholesale, Smith refined her definition:

To me, racist white women cannot be said to be actually feminist, at least not in the way I think and feel about the word. Feminism in and of itself would be fine. The problems arise with the mortals who practice it . As Third World women, we must define a responsible and radical feminism for ourselves and not assume that bourgeois female self-aggrandizement is all that feminism is.

With this rousing cri de coeur, Smith surfaced an important contradiction: “bourgeois female self-aggrandizement” is categorically not feminism, but it is also “not all that feminism is” — in other words, it’s a feminism, perhaps even the dominant feminism, just not the one Smith supported. The contradiction still vexes forty-seven years later. Which statement was more true, the first or the second? Can a nonfeminism so overwhelm the mainstream that it supplants the real thing?