White Women, Anti-Imperialist Feminism and the Story of Race within the US Women’s Liberation Movement

In the past decade, histories of the United States women’s liberation movement of the 1960s, 70s and 80s have begun to re-write what Sherna Berger Gluck famously called the ‘master historical narrative’ of this movement and have especially worked to historicize the efforts of feminists of colour. This paper sees itself in concert with this recent body of scholarship as it attempts to enrich our understanding of the interplay of race and Second Wave activity by exploring the question of how white feminists embraced racial justice politics, particularly during the early 1970s, when it is often assumed that the vast majority of white feminists failed to enact racial justice. In historicizing the efforts of a loose group of white anti-imperialist feminists in the greater Boston area, I maintain that the ‘master historical narrative’ wrote not only black, Chicana and multiracial feminisms out of history, but that it skewed our understanding of the race politics of white, US feminists.