Second Wave Feminist Analysis

During the second wave feminist movement, racism was a primary area of struggle that led to a political division of feminism into 'black' and 'white' (Tang 1991, p1). According to the Black feminists, the white feminism perceived women’s oppression as a homogeneous concept, whereby they endeavoured to build a common notion of sisterhood that underpinned by the gender discrimination but regardless of race and class inequalities. As a result, Black women have been made unnoticeable within the white feminist ideologies (Tee, 1995 p44). Likewise, a radical black feminist, Bell Hook (1981 p128) asserts that not only the white feminist ideologies have failed to recognise the interconnection between racism and sexist oppression. But also, the white ethnocentric values have led many white feminist theorists to argue the importance of sexism over racism and therefore she alleged that during the second wave …show more content…
According to Hook (1981), this was the reason that many black women were excluded from the white feminist movement as they resisted to embrace the “victim ideology”. Furthermore, as per Abbott (2005), Black feminists have alleged that during the second wave feminism, the dynamics of white women’s racism towards women of colour took a subtle and more convert form. For instance, black women or women of colour were not given any adequate participation in policy making or they were restricted during the development of feminist theories. Likewise, during the second wave feminism, white feminists’ lack of willingness to accommodate culturally sensitive practices when interacting with women of colour, is another exemplar of their concealed application of