Chicana Feminist Movement example essay topic

The Chicana Feminist movement evolved between 1970 to 1980. It addressed concerns of Chicanas due to the interplay of race, class, and gender oppression. The Chicanas struggled to gain equal status in the male dominated movement. Both liberal and radical feminists hope to achieve gender solidarity through the politics of identity. Poet Robin Morgan called the anthology of feminist essays she edited in 1970 Sisterhood Is Powerful. As women of color pointed out from the beginning of the movement, sisterhood was also complicated.

Many women of color felt excluded from a theory that elevated gender at the expense of race or class identity. By making white women's experience their standard, both liberal and radical feminists overlooked the perspectives of women of color. For example, when Betty Friedan called for liberating women from the home through employment, women of color who had always worked knew that joining the men of their race on the job meant they would still encounter discrimination. Or when the radical feminist theologian Mary Daly spoke about reclaiming women's spirituality through rituals honoring the goddess African American poet Aud re Lorde asked, "What color is your goddess?" A white female deity marched the white male deity, ignoring the heritage of African spirituality. Separatist politics troubled other women of color.

For many Chicanas, the extended family represented both economic and cultural survival. "When a family is involved in a human rights movement, as is the Mexican-American family", Enrique ta Long eaux y Vasquez wrote in 1972, "there is little room for a woman's liberation movement alone". Other women of color echoed the pervasive homophobia of the society when they rejected feminism because of its inclusion of lesbians (Chicana Feminism). Despite these tensions, women of color in the United States clearly recognized that gender as well as race affected their lives. A 1972 poll showed that two-thirds of black women, compared to only one-third of white women, were sympathetic to the women's movement. A 1976 survey of Chicana students found agreement with the goals of feminism as well as the view that the white women's movement was elitist and too focused on men as the oppressors.

Many women of color longed for a more inclusive feminism. Former SNC C worker Elizabeth Martinez, for example, recalled that after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, she realized that "if the struggle against sexism did not see itself as profoundly entwined with the fight against racism, I was gone". At the same time, though, she "looked hard at the sexism in the Chicano movimiento, and knew a Chicana feminism needed to be born.".