Friedan in 1963, galvanized the movement that reshaped female aspirations, launched women into the workforce, and changed the course of history.2 The “problem that has no name,” as she described women’s malaise, branded the ensuing movement as feminism.
Yet from the get-go, Friedan’s vision of feminism was not universal. While white, middle-class women framed access to work outside the home as a form of liberation, black women yearned to be liberated from work—from low-paying jobs with poor working conditions where they had little to no opportunity for advancement. As black feminist author and activist bell hooks challenged, “[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.”3 For the vast majority of black women in 1963, the work available to them was a source of oppression, not liberation; a necessity, not a luxury; a constraint on their fulfillment, not an avenue toward it.
This is not to say that black women had no part in the feminist movement of the 1960s. On the contrary, black women were, in fact, on the frontlines of not one, but two fights for equal rights in the mid-twentieth century. Many black feminists stretched their activism to push for the rights for both women and blacks, often from the margins of both movements. Some black feminists were directly involved in the women’s liberation movement, like Civil Rights activist and lawyer Pauli Murray, who cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 alongside Friedan, and Ms. Magazine cocreator Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who collaborated closely with Gloria Steinem to found the Women’s Action Alliance; others campaigned for the rights of black women specifically, such as bell hooks and womanist author and activist Alice Walker.4 Many of the most influential black feminists, including Frances Beale, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, Florynce Kennedy and Cellestine Ware, to name just a few, identified more closely with the fight for Civil Rights than with women’s liberation, but their leadership in the Black Power movement wasn’t lost on the leaders of the women’s movement.5 As Gloria Steinem reflected in a 2015 interview, “I learned feminism largely from black women. Women of color basically invented feminism.”6
What united these early black and white feminist leaders was their quest for equality. Pan-Africanist writer and political activist Amy Jacques Garvey presaged Friedan by several decades when she wrote that the modern woman “prefers to be a bread-winner than a half-starved wife at home.”7 Yet white women’s career-minded approach to this shared dream grated on black women, as it glossed over glaring racial inequities. As Jacques Garvey pointed out, “White women have greater opportunities to display their ability because of the standing of both races…yet who is more deserving of admiration than the black woman, she who has borne the rigors of slavery, the deprivations consequent on a pauperized race, and the indignities heaped upon a weak and defenseless people?”8
What separated black and white feminists was not the destination they envisioned, but rather where they began and the steps they perceived as necessary to attain their goal. “I saw white women as having privilege,” observes former Washington, DC Councilwoman Charlene Drew Jarvis. “We were not starting at the same place.” Indeed, black women struggled even to be seen as women, let alone as women who deserved more respect and accommodation from men. As Sojourner Truth, one of the founding mothers of feminism, observed in 1851, “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?”9
Different starting gates inspired separate strategies for change, ultimately setting black and white women on divergent paths towards empowerment in the workplace and beyond.10
Women’s Work
In her 2014 speech in acceptance of the Hollywood Reporter’s Sherry Lansing Leadership award, Shonda Rhimes gave Hollywood women a congratulatory pat on the back. “Thirty years ago, I’d think maybe there’d be a thousand secretaries fending off their handsy bosses back at the office, and about two women in Hollywood in this room,” Rhimes said. Then she observed, “And if I were here, I would be serving breakfast.”11
Rhimes’s point—that between then and now, women have made extraordinary progress—serves to underscore not just white and black women’s achievements, but also the chasm between their trajectories. Thirty years ago, a handful of white women had managed to battle their way to the top in a few professions, notably entertainment and media, with the majority forced to choose between becoming secretaries and staying home with their children. Most black women didn’t even have that choice.
The contrast between the experience of white and black working women in the early twentieth century is stark. White women’s path into the workplace is a now-familiar story: when World War II emptied factories and offices of men, women were able to enter male-dominated occupations for the first time.12 From manufacturing planes to piloting them, and from putting out newspapers to practicing medicine, Rosie the Riveter broke down workplace barriers in the name of patriotism. By the 1950s, however, the influx of recently-returned men forced many of these women to exit the workforce.13 Those who could afford to leave became housewives and stay-at-home mothers, setting the stage for both America’s burgeoning middle class and for Friedan’s “problem that has no name.”14
Black women also saw an occupational shift during the war: many left sharecropping—an exploitative system of plantation farming whose roots extended back into slavery—to work in factories or institutions like schools and hospitals.15 But most of the industries that had welcomed white women as skilled or semi-skilled laborers were not willing to hire black women,16 as Maya Angelou discovered when, in wartime San Francisco, she went to the railway personnel office to apply for a job as streetcar conductor. “The receptionist was not innocent and neither was I,” she writes. “The whole charade we had played out in that crummy waiting room had directly to do with me, Black, and her, white.”17
Angelou paid innumerable visits to that office before she finally became San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor. Most black women were not so lucky. They had to settle for low-paying, dangerous, or demeaning jobs with no chance of advancement. In airplane assembly plants, for example, black women suffocated in unventilated “dope rooms” full of noxious glue fumes; in sintering plants, they were baked in the heat of blasting furnaces and coated in iron ore dust.18 In safer venues, like hospitals, black women were confined to undesirable roles such as those in laundry and janitorial services.19 When the men returned from the front, moreover, working black women didn’t go home. As they had before the war, approximately one third of married black women continued to work outside the home—a rate that far outstripped their married white peers.20
As the women’s liberation movement picked up steam in the sixties and seventies, black and white women continued to follow different career trajectories. Some white women battled their way into male-dominated workspaces, seeking liberation from suburban homemaking as per Friedan’s model. This depiction of white women’s working experience is, of course, heavily dependent on a certain level of economic privilege. For the 25 percent of families headed by white women living at or below the poverty line, the story was quite different. 21
Still, even white women of lesser means faced fewer barriers to success than their black peers. Despite avenues provided by the Civil Rights movement and the introduction of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, black women faced the double liability of racial discrimination and economic need.22 Barely four generations had passed since the end of slavery; most black families simply had not had the time to accrue the wealth whites had been building for centuries, and Jim Crow laws continued to limit the ability of black families to accumulate material property.23 This ongoing racial discrimination and segregation plagued even middle-class black women’s entry into the corporate world. Instead, black women like Charlene Drew Jarvis found some success in the public sector, where antidiscrimination policy was more vigorously enforced.24
