AP® African American Studies review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/african-american-studies/units/4/4-13)
Unit 4 · Topic 4.13
4.13 The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality
The Black feminist movement of the 1970s built on centuries of Black women's activism to show how racism, sexism and other oppressions work together. The Combahee River Collective, Alice Walker's idea of womanism and Kimberlé Crenshaw's term intersectionality each gave language to Black women's distinct experiences.
Key terms
- Black feminism
- Combahee River Collective
- womanism
- Alice Walker
- intersectionality
- Kimberlé Crenshaw
A long tradition
Black women have always been central to struggles for freedom and for racial and gender equality. In the 1700s and 1800s, women like Jarena Lee, the first woman authorized to preach in the AME Church, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman resisted oppression as enslaved and free people. Maria W. Stewart (2.14) and Anna Julia Cooper (3.8) wrote about the double burden of race and gender.
In the 1970s, the Black feminist movement drew on these women and others who highlighted Black women's distinct experiences of racism and sexism. Black feminists challenged both mainstream feminism, which often centered white, middle-class women, and Black political movements, which often sidelined women (4.7).
The Combahee River Collective
The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist and lesbian organization based in Boston in the 1970s. It took its name from Harriet Tubman's 1863 Combahee River raid, which freed more than 700 people (2.20).
In its 1977 Statement, a required source, the Collective argued that racism, sexism, class oppression and homophobia are connected and must be fought together, because Black women experience them at the same time. It made a striking claim: since freeing Black women would require destroying all of these systems of oppression, Black women's liberation would free everyone.
Womanism
The writer Alice Walker coined the term 'womanist' and defined it in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. Womanism builds on earlier Black women's activism and opposes both racism within the feminist movement and sexism within Black communities. Some Black women preferred it to 'feminist', a word they associated with a movement that had often ignored them.
Intersectionality
The legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term 'intersectionality' in 1989 and developed it in the early 1990s. It's a framework for understanding how a person's different identities, such as race, gender and class, interact with systems of inequality and privilege to shape their experience.
Crenshaw's starting point was the law. She showed that courts sometimes rejected Black women's discrimination claims because they looked at race and sex separately: an employer that hired Black men and white women could seem fair, even if it hired no Black women. Looking at only one category at a time made Black women's experience invisible.
The concept connected Black feminist scholarship to the long tradition of Black women's activism, and it's now used widely across many fields.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Applying a concept
Explain the concept of intersectionality and give an example of how it applies to Black women's experiences.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Define it: how overlapping identities interact with systems of inequality.
- Step 2: Give an example: a discrimination claim that fails when race and sex are judged separately.
- Step 3: Explain why the concept matters: it makes visible what single-category thinking misses.
Answer: Model answer: Intersectionality, a term Kimberlé Crenshaw coined in 1989, explains how identities like race and gender interact with systems of inequality to create distinct experiences. For example, a company that hires Black men and white women but no Black women might pass a test for race discrimination and a test for sex discrimination separately, while still discriminating against Black women. Intersectionality makes that combined discrimination visible.
Common mistakes
- Thinking Black feminism began in the 1970s. It built on centuries of Black women's activism.
- Mixing up the terms: womanist (Alice Walker, 1980s) and intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw, 1989).
- Defining intersectionality as simply having many identities. It's about how those identities interact with systems of power.
On the exam
- Know who coined each term and roughly when.
- Be ready to trace a line from Stewart and Cooper to the Combahee River Collective and Crenshaw.
Connected topics
- Unit 22.14 Black Organizing in the North: Freedom, Women’s Rights, and Education
- Unit 33.8 Lifting as We Climb: Uplift Ideologies and Black Women’s Rights and Leadership
- Unit 44.7 Black Women’s Leadership and Grassroots Organizing in the Civil Rights Movement
- Unit 44.14 Interlocking Systems of Oppression
Videos
Check yourself
4 questions on 4.13 The Black Feminist Movement, Womanism, and Intersectionality. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
In 1977 a Boston group of Black feminists and lesbians, which named itself after Harriet Tubman's 1863 raid on the Combahee River, issued a collective statement. The authors argued that Black women experienced racial, sexual, class and heterosexual oppression all at once, that these systems were linked, and that freeing Black women would require dismantling all of them, which would in turn free everyone.
Summary written for this practice set of "The Combahee River Collective Statement," 1977 (no quotation)
The authors' main argument is that
The group's choice of name most likely served to
Which later concept most directly builds on the ideas in this statement?
Alice Walker's term "womanist" was meant to describe a feminism that
0 of 4 answered