Unsung Heroines: Role of African American Women in Social Movements

When people think about organizations, leaders, activist, and world changers often times they do not correlate these titles and positions with women, let alone black women. When we think of social resistance movements and the leaders who operate the movements we often think of men. Many people in society think that a man is needed to construct, lead and run a social movement so that it can be affected enough to make a significant change. Stereotypical gender roles are the reason that many of us do not often think of women when we think about social resistance movements. However, African American women played a vital role in their organizations, they were powerful activist and they were adamant about addressing the many issues that black women face in society. One main factor related to the development of the Black feminist ideology are the formation of organizations. The definition of an organization is: an organized body of people with a particular purpose, especially a business, society, association, etc. As a society we know very little about the formality of organizations that helped shaped feminist consciousness. Women’s movements organizations are not always built on structure; as we discussed in class many women’s organizations do not have delegated

Many black feminist movement organizations were ran by women in the background, unless there were strictly constructed for women. Interstitial politics is a term that is used in Springer and it means coveying two meanings for black feminists and their organizations. Black feminist took great pride in their organizations, but there did not let being in an organization confine them to only being activist when they were working with their organizations. We must remember that there is a huge distinction between the black feminist movement, black feminist organizations and black feminist