Black feminism focuses on Black women’s lived experiences, allowing them to discuss and highlight the many aspects of their identity and how this relates to gender inequality.
Black feminism considers how Black women are oppressed by the patriarchy but also by capitalism and racism.
They argue that Black women have been excluded from mainstream feminist movements due to their race while also being excluded from Black liberation movements due to their gender. For this reason, Black feminism is essential to ensure that Black women’s voices are heard.
According to many Black feminists, the most discriminated against people in society are Black and minority-ethnic, working-class women.
Thus, Black feminism often takes an intersectional analysis emphasizing the multiplicity of oppressions Black women face (Brewer, 2020).
There are many types of Black feminists. For instance, radical Black feminists take a stance that is not only anti-racist but anti-capitalist and desire to uproot the patriarchy.
Liberal Black feminists, on the other hand, are likely to focus on reforms to improve equality for Black women within the existing systems of society (Brewer, 2020).
Key Takeaways
- Compound oppression: Black feminism holds that Black women face oppression at the intersection of race and gender, not simply racism and sexism added together.
- Long history: the movement runs from 19th-century figures like Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia Cooper through the Combahee River Collective to Black Lives Matter today.
- Intersectionality: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 term formalised an analytic move Black feminists had already been making for over a century.
- Not one movement: radical, liberal, womanist, and queer/trans strands disagree about how much of the existing social order needs dismantling versus reforming.
- Growing evidence base: a validated scale now measures the gendered racial microaggressions Black feminist theory predicts, and links them to psychological distress.
What Is Intersectionality?
Intersectionality is a critical term in much of Black feminism. It describes ‘how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life’ (Collins & Bilge, 2020).
Intersectional theory views characteristics of individuals such as race, gender, sexual orientation, social class, ability, and age as interrelated and influencing one another. Through intersecting factors, people can experience multiple types of oppression.
In Black feminism, it is often understood that Black women face two types of oppression in society. The first is that they are Black, and the second is that they are women.
Black women can therefore face both sexism and racism. These two forms of discrimination can also interact, creating experiences unique to Black women rather than simply additive ones.
Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term in her 1989 paper, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. The underlying idea is older, though. Ideas of intersectionality are believed to have emerged decades earlier, when Black feminists began speaking out about the white, middle-class nature of mainstream feminism.
Consider a concrete case.
Crenshaw illustrated the concept with a Black woman who felt discriminated against when applying for a job. She believed she was turned down for being both Black and a woman.
The employer disagreed. Her race could not be the cause, it argued, since the company hired Black men; her gender could not be the cause either, since it hired white women.
Crenshaw recognized that Black women’s oppression was often ignored. Society lacked a way to understand these interconnecting oppressions, which affect people in different ways.
Intersectionality has, therefore, broadened societal understanding of the specific oppressions Black women face.
The Matrix of Domination
Patricia Hill Collins gave this idea a sociological elaboration through her concept of the matrix of domination. Race, gender, and class are not three separate systems. They interlock. Together they form a single structure of power that positions everyone at once (Collins, 1990).
Collins also named the mechanism through which this matrix reproduces itself in everyday perception: controlling images. Three examples stand out.
These are racialised-and-gendered stereotypes, such as the ‘mammy,’ the ‘matriarch,’ and the ‘jezebel.’ They function to make Black women’s subordination look natural, rather than a produced outcome of interlocking oppressions (Collins, 1990).
The History of Black Feminism
The history of Black feminism is extensive, with many different figures and movements. Below are some of the critical Black feminists and influential movements of the waves of feminism.
- Sojourner Truth (1851): challenged both racism and sexism in her famous women’s rights convention speech.
- Anna Julia Cooper (1892): published A Voice from the South, earning her the title ‘Mother of Black Feminism.’
- Ida B. Wells (1890s): turned her newspaper into a weapon against lynching after her friends were murdered.
- Second wave (1960s-70s): Black women formed the Third World Women’s Alliance, the NBFO, and the Combahee River Collective.
- Fourth wave (2013-present): Black Lives Matter drew directly on Black feminist ideas of intersectionality and solidarity.
Sojourner Truth
In the 1800s, the early feminist movement was connected to the abolishment of slavery, with speakers such as women’s rights advocate and abolitionist Sojourner Truth speaking out on this issue.
The scene is well known. In 1851, Truth gave a speech at a women’s rights convention, challenging both racism and sexism faced by Black women. Her words vividly contrasted the oppression faced by white and Black women.
The speech is now widely known by the refrain “Ain’t I a Woman?” That exact phrasing is not Truth’s own, though.
Historians have traced it to a version published twelve years later, written in a Southern dialect Truth would not have used. The contemporaneous 1851 transcription, printed within weeks of the speech, is judged the more reliable record (Painter, 1996).
Truth noted that while white middle-class women have traditionally been treated as delicate, over-emotional, and needing help from men, Black women have been vilified and subjected to racist abuse.
Anna Julia Cooper
In 1892, Anna Julia Cooper co-founded several organisations. These promoted Black civil rights and Black women’s education, which she believed would improve the whole community.
Cooper also published a book, A Voice from the South (Cooper, 1892), describing the importance of Black women’s voices for social change.
The book is widely regarded as one of the first expressions of Black feminism. It earned her the title ‘the Mother of Black Feminism.’
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells was an activist and journalist who published her own newspaper in Memphis, Tennessee. When three of her friends were murdered in the 1890s for being Black, she turned her paper into a powerful weapon against lynching.
She was forced into exile when racists threatened her life and destroyed her offices. When this happened, she launched an effective crusade against lynching. She traveled to many cities and towns all over the United States, calling for all to oppose the reign of lynch laws.
Her tour abroad encouraged Europeans to organize solidarity campaigns against the lynching of Black people in the United States (Davis, 1981).
Second wave feminism
During the civil rights movement, many Black women experienced intersectional racism within the feminist movement while simultaneously experiencing sexism within the civil rights movement.
In response to the racism and sexism faced by Black women and other women of color in the 1960s came the development of organizations against their oppression.
Black women from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed the Third World Women’s Alliance in 1968. This group helped to create space in anti-racist organizations and leftist racial movements for women’s voices and issues.
Frances Beal put this into words first, in 1969. That year, she founded SNCC’s Black Women’s Liberation Committee and published the essay ‘Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.’
She argued that Black women faced a compounded oppression of race and sex. Neither movement recognized this fully.
Both movements missed it: one by race, one by sex. Beal’s term ‘double jeopardy’ named this same insight two decades before Crenshaw’s (1989) ‘intersectionality’ gave it its now-standard label.
In 1973, a group of notable Black feminists formed the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), which addressed the double burden of sexism and racism faced by black women. They also emphasized economic survival issues important to Black and working-class women (Brewer, 2020).
A further group organized in Boston in 1977. Black lesbian feminists including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde formed the Combahee River Collective there. This group recognized that the double burden of sexism and racism was integral to the distinction between their movement and white feminism.
The group’s statement linked Black women’s liberation to anti-imperialism, dismantling patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism.
Fourth wave feminism
One of the most famous Black movements in the current wave of feminism is the Black Lives Matter movement, which was created around 2013.
This movement was developed by three Black community organizers – Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi in protest of anti-Black violence, especially in the form of police brutality.
While this movement does not explicitly apply to only Black feminist issues, it draws on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and solidarity between all Black lives, regardless of sex, class, age, sexual orientation, immigrant status, religion, or ability.
Strands of Black Feminism
Black feminism is not one single position. It is a family of related positions that agree Black women face a distinct form of oppression at the intersection of race and gender, but disagree about what follows politically. Brewer (2020) traces at least four identifiable strands.
Radical Black Feminism
Radical Black feminists treat racism, sexism, and capitalism as interlocking systems. They argue these systems cannot be reformed piecemeal and must be dismantled altogether. Reform is not enough.
The clearest statement of this strand is the Combahee River Collective’s own 1977 statement.
It rejected both an anti-racist politics that subordinated gender and a feminist politics that subordinated race. The Collective named capitalism, not only patriarchy, as a target.
It insisted that Black women’s own experience, not theory imported from white feminism, should be the starting point for political analysis (Combahee River Collective, 1978).
Angela Davis’s writing sits within this tradition too. She connects Black women’s oppression under slavery directly to its persistence under capitalism (Davis, 1981).
Radical Black feminism’s practical goal is less about winning a larger share of existing institutional power for Black women than about transforming the institutions themselves.
Liberal Black Feminism
Liberal Black feminists, by contrast, tend to work within existing institutions. They seek equal representation for Black women in electoral politics, corporate leadership, and the legal system. The method is reform.
This strand is closer in method to mainstream liberal feminism, using litigation and legislative reform to secure equal rights. It insists, though, that Black women’s specific barriers need race-conscious remedies, not colour-blind equal-treatment law alone.
Crenshaw herself fits this mold.
Crenshaw’s own legal scholarship built the analytic tool that radical Black feminists also use. Her own approach is liberal, though. Her 1989 analysis argued for reforming antidiscrimination law, not replacing the legal system entirely (Crenshaw, 1989).
Liberal Black feminism’s practical goal is more Black women in positions of institutional power and influence. It reflects the view that diverse leadership will better serve Black women’s interests than reform from outside alone.
Womanism
Womanism offers a third path.
Alice Walker coined the term ‘womanist’ in her 1983 essay collection, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. It stuck immediately. She defined a womanist as a Black feminist or feminist of colour committed to ‘the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female’ (Walker, 1983). That definition matters.
Walker’s own formulation is memorable: ‘womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.’ Womanism centres community and family survival alongside gender liberation, built from Black women’s own vernacular rather than a term some see as coined by and for white women.
Some Black women scholars and activists prefer ‘womanist’ for exactly this reason. They treat the two labels as related, but not interchangeable.
Queer and Trans Black Feminism
A further strand foregrounds Black lesbian, queer, and transgender women specifically, building on the Combahee River Collective’s own self-identification as lesbian feminists. The stakes are personal. It argues that a Black feminism organised only around race and gender risks the same single-axis erasure intersectionality was coined to name.
Contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter have been organised, by co-founders who themselves identify as queer, to include this dimension from the outset. This is not incidental.
Two of the movement’s three co-founders, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Khan-Cullors, identify as queer. Their movement treats sexuality and gender identity as central from the start, not as a secondary concern added on later.
Criticisms of ‘White Feminism’
Black feminists have long criticised mainstream, historically white-led feminism for failing Black women in specific, documented ways. Three criticisms stand out.
- Exclusion from the suffrage movement: white suffragists sought to exclude Black women from the vote campaign, and nearly silenced Sojourner Truth at the 1851 convention.
- Betty Friedan’s blind spot: her 1963 bestseller assumed middle-class comfort, proposing that women hire domestic help without addressing the working conditions of the women who would do that work.
- bell hooks’s structural critique: mainstream feminist theory relied on its most privileged spokeswomen, which obscured the leadership women of colour and poor women actually held in the movement.
Exclusion from the Suffrage Movement
Patricia Hill Collins (2001) found that many African American women reject the label ‘feminism’ itself, seeing it as a term for white Western women rather than for people like them.
Angela Davis (1981) went further. She argued that white feminists’ theory and practice failed to confront racism as a central structure, fighting for white women’s rights while remaining complicit with it (Brewer, 2020).
The example is not isolated.
This pattern reaches back to the first wave of feminism. When women campaigned for the vote, many white feminists tried to exclude Black women from the movement altogether, or pushed them into a separate movement of their own.
Crenshaw records a striking example. When Sojourner Truth rose to speak at the 1851 women’s rights convention, many white women wanted her silenced, afraid she would divert attention from the suffrage cause (Crenshaw, 1989).
Other leaders went further still.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the suffrage movement’s most prominent leaders, has been criticised for using explicitly discriminatory language against Black people. She argued, among other things, that Black men should not win the vote before white women (Davis, 1981).
Betty Friedan’s Blind Spot
The suffrage movement was not an isolated case.
Other criticism of ‘white feminism’ centres on Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. Its target audience was middle-class housewives dissatisfied with a life of housework and childcare. The book became a bestseller.
The book is criticised for ignoring Black and working-class women, who could not afford to hire the domestic help Friedan proposed. Friedan praised mothers who pursued well-paid careers but never addressed the domestic workers those careers relied on, who then faced their own housework and childcare at home.
Domestic workers went unmentioned.
Gerda Lerner criticised Friedan for addressing only middle-class, college-educated women, a shortcoming she traced back to the earlier suffrage movement too. Black women, Lerner explained, were disadvantaged not only by the ‘feminine mystique’ but by the more pressing ‘disadvantages of economic discrimination’ (Horowitz, 1996).
bell hooks’s Structural Critique
Bell hooks (1984) pushed this critique further. Her claim was about the whole structure of the feminist movement, not about any one book.
Hooks argued that mainstream feminist theory was built by relying on its most privileged, most visible women as spokeswomen. That reliance obscured the real leadership that women of colour and poor women held within the wider movement for women’s liberation.
The mechanism is structural, not accidental. Whoever gets chosen to represent a movement shapes which women’s problems that movement treats as central.
This is a structural claim. It is not about any single author’s blind spot. It explains why the same pattern recurs across Collins, Davis, and Lerner’s separate criticisms above. Each names a different book or moment, but hooks’s point is that the movement’s own leadership structure produced all of them.
What Are The Goals Of Black Feminism?
Black feminism includes several distinct strands: radical, liberal, womanist, and queer/trans. Each has its own specific goals.
Liberal Black feminists tend to aim for more Black women in positions of power. Radical Black feminists, by contrast, seek to dismantle the patriarchal systems that benefit white men.
Intersectionality’s aim has been simple: to build a stronger, more meaningful liberation movement for all women, by analysing how mutual systems of oppression combine to produce social inequalities (Collins, 2015).
This has made feminism more inclusive. Modern feminists increasingly welcome women of any race, sexual orientation, social class, age, or ability into the movement, with Black feminists helping drive that shift.
Black Lives Matter was founded on these same principles. It focuses on all groups of Black people, not just one.
The movement works to uplift not only Black women but all of humankind. It highlights the disproportionate violence Black men and women face, particularly from the police, and campaigns for equal human rights, racial equality, and criminal justice for all.
Critical Evaluation
Black feminism supplies an analytic move that single-axis theories cannot. Crenshaw’s (1989) legal analysis and Collins’s (1990) matrix-of-domination framework converge on the same core claim. A Black woman’s oppression is not simply the racism a Black man faces added to the sexism a white woman faces.
This is not only a theoretical claim. Direct quantitative evidence for it comes from the contemporary research below.
- Essentialism risk: Nash (2008) argued that intersectionality scholarship treats Black women as its single paradigmatic subject, without specifying which Black women, risking the very flattening the theory was built to critique.
- Empirical lag: Moradi and Grzanka (2017) found much psychological research invoking ‘intersectionality’ treats it loosely, as having more than one identity, rather than analysing power and structure.
- Generalisability limits: the strongest evidence for the theory’s predictions comes from US samples only, so its concepts may need adaptation elsewhere.
- Reform versus revolution: radical and liberal Black feminists still disagree whether dismantling existing structures or gaining fuller representation within them best serves Black women.
Contemporary Research
Since the mid-2010s, psychology has tested whether the compounded stress Black feminist theory predicts is measurable and consequential, rather than only debating the theory itself.
Measuring Gendered Racial Microaggressions
- Aim: Lewis and Neville (2015) set out to build and validate a scale measuring gendered racial microaggressions, the subtle everyday slights that target Black women at the intersection of race and gender.
- Method: across four studies with over 400 Black women, they generated items from focus-group data, then used factor analysis to identify the scale’s structure and tested it against existing racism and sexism measures.
- Results: the resulting 26-item scale identified four distinct factors, including the ‘Strong Black Woman’ and ‘angry Black Woman’ stereotypes. Higher scores predicted more psychological distress, beyond what generic race-only or gender-only measures predicted.
- Conclusion: gendered racism is empirically separable from, and adds explanatory power beyond, racism and sexism measured on their own.
This scale-validation project sits well up the evidence hierarchy for a measurement question, though all four samples were US-based, so its items may not transfer without adaptation elsewhere.
The ‘Strong Black Woman’ Schema
Donovan and West (2015) tested whether the ‘Strong Black Woman’ schema, the expectation that Black women should project stoicism regardless of hardship, protects against stress.
It does not. Stronger endorsement of the schema made the link between stress and depressive symptoms worse, not better, suggesting the schema is a further burden rather than a resource.
A Methodological Caution
Moradi and Grzanka (2017) reviewed how counselling-psychology research had used ‘intersectionality’ and found much of it loose. Read alongside Lewis and Neville’s findings, this qualifies rather than undermines the overall picture: where researchers apply the framework carefully, its central prediction holds up.
Online Sources
Black Thought and Black Culture
Black Thought and Culture is a landmark collection. It holds roughly 100,000 pages of non-fiction writing. Its authors are major American Black leaders. They include teachers, artists, politicians, religious leaders, athletes, war veterans, and entertainers, active across 250 years of history.
African American Studies Librarians Interest Group (AASLIG)
The African American Studies Librarians Interest Group (AASLIG) is part of ACRL. It addresses scholarly research and library services. The focus is identifying, preserving, and sharing resources for the study of African American history, culture, and life.
Black Feminist Activism: Research Tools
Bates College Black Feminist Activism Research Guide with databases and primary sources. This will be helpful to find books, journals, and articles.
Black Feminist Activism: Research Tools
This introductory research guide, created by Amara Green, highlights the works of Black women held in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the New York Public Library.
These works specifically engage in the black feminist tradition of working towards the inclusion of black female narratives, highlighting black women”s involvement in black liberation and gender equality movements.
References
Beale, F. (1970). Double jeopardy: To be Black and female. In T. Cade (Ed.), The Black woman: An anthology (pp. 90-100). Signet.
Breines, W. (2007). struggling to connect: white and black feminism in the movement years. contexts, 6 (1), 18-24.
Brewer, R. M. (2020). Black feminism and womanism. Companion to feminist studies, 91-104.
Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought in the matrix of domination. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, 138 (1990), 221-238.
Collins, P. H. (2015). The social construction of black feminist thought. In Women, Knowledge, and Reality (pp. 222-248). Routledge.
Collins, P. H. (2001). Like one of the family: race, ethnicity, and the paradox of US national identity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 24 (1), 3-28.
Collins, P. H. (2002). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge.
Collins, P. H. (2015). Intersectionality’s definitional dilemmas. Annual review of sociology, 4 1(1), 1-20.
Collins, P. H. (2020). Defining black feminist thought. In Feminist theory reader (pp. 278-290). Routledge.
Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality. John Wiley & Sons.
Combahee River Collective. (1978). A Black feminist statement. In Z. Eisenstein (Ed.), Capitalist patriarchy and the case for socialist feminism (pp. 210-218). Monthly Review Press.
Cooper, A. J. (1892). A voice from the South. Aldine Printing House.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. In Feminist Legal Theories (pp. 23-51). Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. W. (2013). Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. In The public nature of private violence (pp. 93-118). Routledge.
Davis, A. Y. (1981). Women, race, and class. Vintage.
Donovan, R. A., & West, L. M. (2015). Stress and mental health: Moderating role of the Strong Black Woman stereotype. Journal of Black Psychology, 41(4), 384-396. https://doi.org/10.1177/0095798414543014
hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center. South End Press.
Horowitz, D. (1996). Rethinking Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique: Labor union radicalism and feminism in cold war America. American Quarterly, 48 (1), 1-42.
Lewis, J. A., & Neville, H. A. (2015). Construction and initial validation of the Gendered Racial Microaggressions Scale for Black women. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 62(2), 289-302. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000062
Moradi, B., & Grzanka, P. R. (2017). Using intersectionality responsibly: Toward critical epistemology, structural analysis, and social justice activism. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 64(5), 500-513. https://doi.org/10.1037/cou0000203
Nash, J. C. (2008). Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review, 89(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2008.4
Nash, J. C. (2019). Black feminism reimagined: After intersectionality. Duke University Press.
Painter, N. I. (1996). Sojourner Truth: A life, a symbol. W. W. Norton.
Walker, A. (1983). In search of our mothers’ gardens: Womanist prose. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
