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 Achieving feminist goals across socialand ethnic barriers
 By Lauren Rabaino | WS 450 Feminist Theory | Final Report | June 11, 2009
Feminism was a movement that, from the start, wanted to ignore the “color” issue. At theconvention in Akron, Ohio when Sojourner Truth gave her infamous speech, women wereworried that the race problem would get in the way of the feminist agenda. “Every newspaper inthe land will have our cause mixed with abolition,” the chairman of the convention wasdocumented as saying (Truth 93). That initial tone of divide among feminism and other forms of oppression has forever laid a path that places white, middle class feminism at the forefront,leaving women of color and lower class in the dust. Feminism is a movement that, to this day,continues to exclude women of minority classes and races, but that there is hope that in the futurethe movement can become all-encompassing.Iris Marion Young argues that minorities endure five layers of oppression that themajority – white, middle-class women – are generally shielded from. The five forms of oppression include: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism andviolence. Although not explicitly stated, we see these five forms of oppression reiterated in thewritings of various minority feminists. Young describes exploitation as oppression what happensdirectly through political means and Sojourner Truth exemplifies this form in her powerfulspeech about the struggles she endured as a slave (Young 5, Truth 90). Marginalization refers tothe group of underclass people whom the labor force will not use (Young 8). An example of thisnotion in action is materialized through examples given by Elizabeth Martinez about the Chicanawoman who is forced to work in the fields in her adolescence out of necessity and lack of other options for generating an income for her family (Martinez 41). Young describes powerlessness as
 
a form of oppression experienced by the non-professionals of the workforce who lack privilegesof the professional sector (Young 10). Cultural imperialism is defined by Young in the followingmanner:
To experience cultural imperialism means to experience how the dominant meanings of a society render the particular perspective of one’s own group and mark it out as the Other (Young 12).
This very definition of cultural imperialism is what Esther Ngan-Ling Chow describes as the“individual or psychological” struggles Asian Americans endure when faced with the conflict of accepting ideals of the American feminist movement (Chow 212). Young describes the finalform of oppression – violence – as the obvious: random, unprovoked attacks (based solely onrace) and sexual assault (Young 13). The women who wrote the Combahee collective statementtalk about the latter when addressing the fact that Black women are often sexually assaulted because of their race and gender combined. Each form of oppression is illustrated within thewritings of various minority feminists.The reason each of these forms of oppression is important in terms of minorities is because it exemplifies perfectly the reasons why feminism has not been an all-inclusivemovement thus far. The problems endured by women of color go far beyond the scope generallyaddressed by the white, elitist feminists. Typically, they aforementioned group fights for “equality” in the vague sense or “women’s rights.” The goals of feminists are dispersed and oftenunclear, but all rooted in completely restructuring society. Looking at the writings of leadingwhite feminists, it’s further proven that minorities are left out of the picture. For example, inVirginia Woolf’s essay
 Professions for Women,
she writes about the unjustness for womenwriters when it comes to the “Angel in the House” (Woolf 60). What she doesn’t consider is thatduring her time period, the difficulty for women to write honestly and openly about their 
 
sexuality was not even close to being an important issue for women of color. In fact, mostwomen of color in that time period did not have education, much less a valid consciousness for the difficulty of writing about women’s issues. The goals and concerns for someone like Woolf versus someone like Truth during that time period were on opposite ends of the spectrum.We see a theme of disconnect throughout most examples of minority feminist writing. AsElizabeth Martinez argues in
 La Chicana,
Chicana women are oppressed with two additionallayers above sexism – oppression and imperialism (Martinez 41). This makes the struggle of Chicana women even more difficult to endure. The Chicana woman has to deal with strugglesthe average white woman doesn’t, like being a single mother. The women’s liberation movementheaded by white, middle class Americans rejects the traditional family; the Chicana feminist usesthe family as “a source of unity” and as a “major defense against the oppressor” (Martinez 43).When these understandings of the world and empowerment are different among women withdifferent backgrounds and cultural histories, finding a common ground for goals becomesdifficult. The white feminist focuses solely on sexism, but not on the imperialism or racismaspects that have become so intertwined in the sexism dealt with by Chicana women. Thesolution is not to take each problem one at a time by first solving racism, then moving ontoimperialism, then fighting sexism alongside the white women. It does not work that way becausethe three issues cannot be separated. As Martinez says, “They are all a part of the same system,they are three faces of the same enemy” (Martinez 43). The only way to overcome all three is tounderstand how they are linked and face it as one problem instead of three separate problems.This is something the white feminist has not done.Esther Ngan-Ling Chow argues that – much like the Chicana woman – Asian womenendure layered forms of oppression that the white woman cannot fathom. The Asian woman has
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