{"id":1182,"date":"2017-02-20T08:00:44","date_gmt":"2017-02-20T12:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/annelitwin.com\/?p=1182"},"modified":"2017-02-20T08:00:44","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T12:00:44","slug":"who-is-a-feminist-what-is-intersectional-feminism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.annelitwin.com\/blog\/blog-posts\/who-is-a-feminist-what-is-intersectional-feminism\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Is a Feminist? What Is Intersectional Feminism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\tI became an active feminist in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the second-wave feminist movement. In some ways, what being a feminist means to me has never changed: being committed to making life better for women\u2014all women. At the same time, my understanding of what feminism means has morphed and evolved over the years and is not the same as in the 1960\u2019s and 1970\u2019s. At that time, we white middle-class second wave feminists thought we were fighting to improve the lives of all women, but we were clueless about the issues of women who were not white, straight, and middle class. This cluelessness inflicted serious damage on the credibility of feminism, for good reason. Some of us, myself included, were slow learners.\nThe seeds of distrust between middle-class white feminists and women of color were actually planted long long ago during the first wave of feminism. The white leaders of the fight to get the vote for women, the suffragists, did not allow the issues of black women onto their agenda. They decided to stay focused on the vote and would not include the abolition of slavery in their fight. The plea of Sojourner Truth, an African American woman who had been a slave, to the suffragists at their convention, \u201cAin\u2019t I a woman, too?\u201d summed up a challenge to the suffragists to be inclusive of black women\u2019s issues in their women\u2019s movement. This plea went largely unheeded.\nUnderstanding this history, I was not surprised that many women of color had a strong reaction when the January 21, 2017, Women\u2019s March on Washington (and in three hundred other cities) was announced. Many women of color felt their issues and leadership were excluded by the organizers. While there were some missteps in the language and leadership of the march when it was first announced, these mistakes seem to have been corrected fairly quickly. Still, the damage was done for some who were too angry to participate.\nWhen I attended the march, though, I was pleased to see a wide range of issues represented by the marchers, who all felt like they belonged under the banner of feminism. I now understand that there are many feminisms, not just one, and there are both differences and commonalities among them. At the march I saw many signs held by women of all ages and races that said, \u201cI am an intersectional feminist,\u201d and I thought, \u201cYes! This represents how I think of feminism now.\u201d\nFor me, intersectional feminism means that in order to improve the lives of all women, we must understand the ways that our differences in social class, sexual orientation, immigration status, nationality of origin, race, ethnicity, gender identity, and other differences intersect with our gender to make some issues more important than others for different groups of women.\nFor example, If I am a low-wage worker, earning a living wage and getting access to affordable child care is probably more important to me than closing the gender pay gap. If I am an African American woman, stopping the indiscriminate killing of black women and men by police officers and stopping the mass incarceration of black men probably would be more important than closing the gender pay gap.\nIt\u2019s not that the gender pay gap isn\u2019t important, but we need to understand how the intersections of gender and other differences make our experiences and priorities as women different. We also need to be able to stand up for each other\u2019s issues and speak up for each other\u2019s priority struggles. All of our issues need to be on the change agenda to improve the lives of women.\nAs an intersectional feminist, these are issues that I think belong on the change agenda that we must work on together:\n\n\n