"A Common Fate of Discrimination": Race-Gender Analogies in Legal and Historical Perspective

Abstract

In her classic work Ain’t I a Woman, African-American feminist critic bell hooks excoriated white feminists for their “ constant comparison[s] of the plight of ‘women’ and ‘blacks,’” 1 charging that such analogies “ support the exclusion of black women” 2 and represent the linguistic expression of a “ sexist-racist attitude” 3 endemic to the women’s liberation movement. Hooks, writing in the early 1980s, perceived analogies between racial and sexual oppression—at least as articulated by white women who “ used black people as metaphors” —as a quintessentially opportunistic, parasitic, and marginalizing practice. Two decades earlier, when civil rights attorney Pauli Murray, already a veteran of battles against racial and sexual exclusion, was searching for a means of persuading skeptics that the eradication of “ Jane Crow” deserved moral commitment and legal mobilization equivalent to the fight against “ Jim Crow,” she had emphasized the “ strikingly similar positions in American society” of “ women and Negroes.” 5 Invoking the “ parallel and interrelated” histories of women’s rights and civil rights movements, Murray articulated an analogy that superficially resembled the very comparison hooks would later condemn. Powerful political and legal imperatives shaped Murray’s decision to invoke an analogy between race and sex in the early 1960s. In so doing, she deliberately and self-consciously adopted a long tradition within feminist advocacy traceable to the genesis of the antebellum woman’s rights struggle