Three decades of women’s history in the United States

racial diversification of the field, to the point that women’s historians can really begin to speak of a truly multiracial, multivocal history of American women. Nothing could be more crucial, not only to the academic discipline of women’s history, but also to the future of the feminist political movement to which it is connected. (NWHP) Now, for the first time in the United States, we are beginning to see a truly comprehensive feminist politics that is genuinely heterogeneous, and capable of tolerating different as well as similar experiences and perspectives among women. Feminism is now being “spoken” and claimed by a wider range of women, especially with respect to race and ethnicity, than ever before. .The multiracial diversification of women’s history is particularly important at the educational level, in order to make women’s history exciting and inspiring for young women from all backgrounds.

This shift has been particularly important because there have been periods in which American feminism has historically was very (though not exclusively) white and at times openly racist. American feminists have been speaking of the oppression and liberation of “woman” for a century and a half but the actual purview of the movement for too long been was limited to women of a narrow social stratum. . This was especially true in the early twentieth century, when the rise of a powerful women’s movement coincided with a low point in American racial relations

The American women’s history revival of the 1970s, growing as it did out of the final stages of the US civil rights movement, was aware of and attentive to racial differences of power, to the history of black oppression in this country, and to the necessity of researching the history of African American women. Women’s liberation historians had to reach further back,in American history to the to the abolitionist feminism of the mid nineteenth century for their inspiration. There we found inspiring figures who combined battles for women’s equality and against racist inequality.