Adherents of the feminist movement have learned, over time, that in a healthy movement many versions of feminism must compete and collaborate in an atmosphere of mutual challenge and synergy. In the United States, the movement has been refined, enlarged, and sometimes completely changed by the work of black feminist writers, the diverse experiences of black and other women of color activists, and the experiences of women of all races who are not activists. These groups have, for example, been responsible for the currently dominant conclusion that the plural "feminisms" rather than the singular "feminism" most accurately describes the varied lessons different groups and subgroups have drawn from their experiences challenging the inequalities between men and women.

Black and white women, activists and non-activists do not always have the same trajectories regarding the interaction of race, gender and feminist ideas. In the early days of the second wave of the feminist movement in the United States, from approximately l964 to l974, many political activists among black women rejected feminist ideas, as did many political activists among white women. Some commentators even concluded that "the black woman" rejected the women's liberation movement. As we will see, however, non-activist black women were more likely than whites to report on surveys that they supported both "the women's movement" and "feminism." Among activists and non-activists, black women's support for feminism has almost always been combined with support for racially-targeted causes, including in many cases explicit support for black men. Other issues relating to gender have also taken different modal trajectories by race.

In this chapter I discuss one example of an experience that seems to differ in its incidence by race, gender, and education. This is the likelihood of one's being told one is "too independent," with whatever connotations that charge might have in everyday life. I stumbled across this issue in the course of a series of relatively open-ended interviews with fifty low-income women in the United States. The interviews, with thirty-two white and eighteen black low-income women, derived from a non-representative, opportunistic sample whom I could meet through a mutual friend. From l991 to l994, I interviewed seven to nine women in each of several occupational categories: Mothers receiving AFDC in Chicago, educational paraprofessionals in New York, secretaries in Missouri, minimum wage workers in South Carolina, police officers in another large city (anonymous for confidentiality), and farm women in Kansas. In each case except the Kansas farm women (all white), the occupational categories interviewed had a mix of black and white members. Because of the non-representative nature of the group I interviewed, I followed up the issue of independence through two telephone surveys, in l993 and l994, of a representative sample of English-speaking residents in the Chicago area.

I. Black women activists' ambivalence regarding the feminist movement, l964-1974 and beyond

Not long after the "second wave" of the women's movement developed its first formal organizations among primarily white and middle class women in the late l960s, politically active black women responded in at least two ways. As we will see, many avoided or condemned the women's movement as both not representing their concerns and having the potential to divide the black community. Others found issues of gender inequality a relatively high priority for them as black women.

Yet even the activist black women who were attracted to the women's movement soon began to point out the deeply embedded racism of some of the movement's positions and almost all of its organizations. Almost every distinguished black feminist writer has among her works at least one thoughtful and critical essay about the ways she and her interests were excluded or marginalized in the white middle class feminist organizations she tried to join or the white middle class feminists with whom she spoke. Writers as different in personality and political perspective as Michele Wallace ([l975] 1990), Audre Lorde ([1979] [1980] 1984), Alice Walker ([l979] 1983b) and bell hooks (1981) all report the effects of conscious and unconscious racism they encountered in these organizations and encounters, including the short shrift given to their central concerns. Indeed, for many black women today, the word "feminism" still connotes a movement that is white and middle-class, because white middle class women have been the most visible and powerful actors in the movement. For these reasons, among others, Alice Walker in l983 coined the term "womanist" for the convictions of black feminists, writing that "Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender" (1983, xii) -- stronger, deeper, more vibrant, and in all ways less white. Most feminists now realize that feminist issues are often inextricably shot through with race. It is not possible literally to conceive of one without the other.

Consider women as sexual objects. White feminists have pointed out how ideals of femininity tend to subordinate women by, for example, encouraging high heels (Brownmiller l984). black feminists point out that most "feminine" images have a racial component as well: fair skin, blue eyes, blond hair. In fending off the destructive messages embodied in traditional femininity, black women must also fend off a deeply embodied racism. Michele Wallace writes:

On rainy days my sister and I used to tie the short end of a scarf around out scrawny braids and let the rest of its silken mass trail to our waists. We'd pretend it was hair and that we were some lovely heroine that we'd seen in the movies. There was a time when I would have called that wanting to be white, yet the real point of the game was being feminine. Being feminine meant white to us (1990, 18).

Although the feminist quest for an ideal of beauty based on character rather than ascriptive traits can be shared by black and white women, for black women the struggle includes a struggle against racism in ways that white women rarely see so clearly.

Consider too the issue of violence against women. Black women show us that any extended feminist critique of rape, incest and battering must include a critique and understanding of the processes that lie behind the lynchings of black men and white fears of black male sexuality. Black women also confront a conflict when in response to domestic violence they call upon police forces that have historically been racist, targeting in particular young black men.

Finally, on the issue that this chapter addresses, consider material, physical and emotional independence. The Southern cult of true womanhood equated femininity not only with whiteness but with weakness (Carby 1987, 20-39, 48-57, 66-69, 95-120). The delicate white woman, who needed a man to open a door for her or help her out of her chair, was contrasted explicitly to the strong black female slave, who could do as much work in the field as a man. After slavery, in contrast to the typical white woman, many black women worked in the paid labor force all their lives and were brought up to expect such work (Jones l985). Today the image of "the strong black women," who can support a household on her own, graduate from college at the same rate as black men, and deal with sexual harassment by giving as good as she gets, serves both as a source of pride for black women and as an overly-demanding model that blames any weakness on the woman herself. Here, as on almost all other central feminist issues, the experiences of women in the United States are intertwined with race and racial meanings.

Although the founding mothers of NOW at the highest levels included the Reverend Pauli Murray and Aileen Hernandez, although black women such as Florynce Kennedy, Frances Beal, Cellestine Ware and Patricia Robinson were active in various ways in the early days of the women's liberation movement (Echols l989, 291), and although that early women's movement addressed issues, such as abortion and childcare, that affected all classes and races, neither NOW nor the "younger," more "radical" (Freeman l975) branches of the women's movement developed these issues in ways that adequately captured the concerns of black women activists. In the case of abortion, for example, the movement did not develop a strong critique of the lack of consent or manipulated consent involved in the sterilization of poor and often black women. In the case of childcare, most feminist analyses did not usually take into account the discomfort many black and working class women had in leaving their children with non-relatives. As a consequence of these and many other differences in sensitivity and orientation, the response of most black women activists to the emerging women's movement was mixed at best.

Some small part of that mixed response had its base in many white and black women's differing experiences with "independence" from men. Cynthia Washington, reflecting in l977 on a conversation with Casey Hayden in l964, a year before Hayden and Mary King's "a kind of memo" on the subordination of women in the civil rights movement, suggests how modal differences by race on the question of independence can affect politics:

Certain differences result from the way in which black women grow up. We have been raised to function independently. ...It seemed to many of us [black women in the civil rights movement]...that white women were demanding a chance to be independent while we needed help and assistance which was not always forthcoming. We definitely started from opposite ends of the spectrum... (Washington l977, 14).

In 1971, Jean Cooper also concluded that the issue of independence affected black and white women differently. "The idea of liberation and independence of black women," she wrote, "is no less than a two edged sword and presents a real dilemma. Central to this dilemma is the strong role which economic and social conditions in the society have forced the black woman to play. ...[I]n some respects black women have always been liberated, more so than they sought or desired" (l971, 522-3; see also Ladner [1971] 1995, 35, 283; also Echols l989, 302, n. 28).

Diane Lewis explained what she considered a widespread "initial rejection . . . [of] the women's movement on the part of black women" by suggesting that until the black liberation movement had begun to generate important structural shifts in black-white relations in the l960s, racism had to be the priority. When Gerder Lerner (l972) collected quotations from notable black women, none explicitly supported the newly developing women's movement and several implicitly or explicitly denounced it. In an interview with Lerner, Dara Abubakeri, Vice President, South, of the Republic of New Africa, produced a double-edged analysis. At first she stated bluntly:

I feel that the role of black woman at this point in history is to give sustenance to the black man. ...We cannot separate, and this is what I say to the Women's Lib movement. You cannot separate men from women when you're black. ...The black woman is liberated in her own mind, because she has taken on responsibility for the family and she works. ...The black woman is independent.

She then added:

Now the black woman has been independent, but still she hasn't been able to make any decisions. She is liberated in her own mind, but the whole country still oppresses her as a woman. Women must be free to choose what they want. They should be free to decide if and when they want children. ... Men shouldn't tell us. Nobody should tell us.

Abubakeri made it clear that on the question of independence many African American women began in a different place from that of most white women. But the issue of independence did not thereby become irrelevant.

In the Spring of l973 Margaret Sloan (one of the founding editors of Ms. magazine) and Florynce Kennedy (an activist lawyer) brought together thirty black women to found the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO). The NBFO organized a press conference in New York in August, getting over 400 phone calls the next day, 200 attendees for a meeting a week later, and 400 to 500 for a conference two and a half months later. Chapters opened in city after city. Divisions within the organization -- over the appropriate degree of radicalism versus liberalism, lesbian/straight conflicts, and strong opposition from women who saw the organization as undermining the solidarity necessary to the black power struggle -- soon produced disintegration. But at its height the NBFO enlisted women such as Alice Walker and Michele Wallace, who rapidly established themselves as major black feminist writers.

Distinguishing themselves as more radical than the NBFO and spinning off from the organization's first Eastern regional conference, the Combahee River Collective began meeting together in Boston in l974. In l977 the collective issued its now famous "Black Feminist Statement," defining oppressions of race, sex and class as "interlocking." The Statement coincided with and presaged a great surge of writings of black and women of color feminists, such as Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls... in l977, Conditions 5: The Black Women's Issue in l979, works by Audre Lorde from l978 on, bell hooks's Ain't I a Woman in l981, Cherie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua's edited volume in l981, Gloria Hull, Patrica Scott and Barbara Smith's volume in l982, and Barbara Smith's edited volume in l983. After that, the lid was off. The number of writings by feminists of color increased exponentially, clarifying the particular perspectives and needs of women of color in societies shaped by histories of domination and subordination based on race, gender, class, and heterosexuality.

One theme in these early writings on interlocking oppressions was that whereas white feminists often came to their understanding of the structured nature of their disadvantages through an intellectually and emotionally revelatory set of experiences (dubbed "the click" by Jane O'Reilly ([l972] l980), black feminists had no such "surprise factor" (Smith and Smith [l980] l983, 114). They did not need to find their independence or come to realize their oppression. Rather:

There is virtually no black person in this country who is surprised about oppression. Virtually not one. Because the thing is we have had it meted out to us from infancy on. ...You're born into it and it's grinding" (Idem.)

The feminist ideas that emerged from these discussions in the l970s and l980s required for their articulation a specifically African American context. Whether the black feminists who were working out these ideas within the context of the larger context of political activity both in the black community and nationwide were a smaller or larger percentage of their relevant activist communities than were white feminists in the communities of political activists that served as their reference group is an uncertain historical question. Although journalists and sociologists might generalize about "the black woman," no systematic data allow us to compare, within the activist population, the percentage of black women political activists who favored feminist ideas to the percentage of white women political activists who favored feminist ideas. The first available systematic evidence derives from a sample not of activists but of state legislators, more than ten years later. Among women state legislators surveyed in 1988, 55 percent of black women legislators said they identified with the label "feminist," compared to only 45 percent of white women legislators.

II. Black women non-activists and the feminist movement, l970-1996

We have more systematic evidence about black and white women in the general population than about activists. Among the general population (almost all of whom are non-activists), black women were more likely than white women to support both feminism and the women's movement from the very beginning. In the short period after the start of "women's liberation" in l968 and before the National Black Feminist Organization in l973, when many black intellectuals and activists were concluding that black women rejected women's liberation, black women were particularly more likely than whites to support the women's movement. In the earliest survey on the women's movement, in l971, 60 percent of a representative sample of black women in the general population told telephone interviewers that they supported "efforts to strengthen women's status in society." In the same survey, only 37 percent of white women expressed such support. A year later, in the first survey to ask specifically about "women's liberation," 67 percent of black women said they were sympathetic to women's liberation groups, compared to only 35 percent of white women -- almost double the support.

A similar pattern emerged in l986, in the first survey to ask women if they considered themselves "feminist." In this survey, a Gallup poll, question placement and wording caused an unusually high percentage of women (56%) to call themselves feminists. Strikingly, 69% of black women responded that they considered themselves "feminist," compared to only 55% of white women. Indeed, 27% of black women said they considered themselves "strong feminists," compared to 8% of white women. In the next year, 1987, Gallup developed a ten-point scale for regarding oneself as a feminist, on which "10" represented a "description that is perfect for you" and "1" a "description that is totally wrong for you." On this survey, 63% of black women put themselves at 6 or above on the scale, compared to 50% of white women, and 19% of black women gave themselves a "10" compared to 8% of white women.

In l989, the Yankelovich organization developed the first form of the question that has now become standard: "Do you consider yourself to be a feminist?" That year, 42% of black women said "yes," compared to 31% of white women. The five surveys that asked a version of this question in the years l991-92, when combined, show 35% of the black women saying they consider themselves feminist, compared to 28% of the white women. Most recently, in the l996 General Social Survey (GSS) 27% of black women said they considered themselves feminists, compared to 26% of white women, and in a l997 CBS News survey, 27% of both black and white women said they considered themselves feminists.

Because the wording and question placement vary from survey to survey, and because the numbers of black women in many surveys are very small (for example, only 32 in the l991 Gallup), it is not easy to track possible increases or declines in either the total percentage of women in the United States calling themselves "feminist" or the size of the differences between black and white women. The l992 NES showed black women leading white by 11 percentage points, a gap non-significantly smaller than the 13 points in the first Gallup survey of l986 and exactly the same as the gap in the first survey with comparable wording, by Yankelovich in l989. The l994 Princeton Survey Research showed black women leading white by 13 percentage points on feminist being "perfect for me," a gap non-significantly larger than the 11 points in l987. But other measures seem to indicate a decreasing gap, including the 1992 Gallup, which shows a statistically insignificant reversal, the l996 General Social Survey, which shows a statistically insignificant gap of only one point, and the l997 CBS News Survey, which shows no gap at all.

Moreover, these results must be interpreted with some caution. Even as late as l994, a small percentage of women and men in the Chicago area interpreted the word "feminist" to mean either someone "who is very feminine" (5%) or "who wants to keep -- not change -- traditional roles between men and women" (6%). In my in-depth interviews, one woman identifying as a "strong feminist" revealed that she meant by this that she was both strong and feminist, not that she had strong feminist views or felt strongly about her feminism.

Yet in spite of these uncertainties about the meaning of the word "feminist"

itself, the general pattern of greater historical support for the feminist movement by

black than by white women can probably be trusted. In the earliest survey that asked about feminism in l986, for example, the "women's movement" was probably a more familiar term than "feminism," and that survey also asked about the "women's movement." In 1986, more than twice the percentage of black women than white (39% compared to 18%) thought the women's movement had done very well in improving their "own" lives. By l996, white women seemed to have caught up, with 45% saying the women's movement had improved their own lives, compared to 49% of black women. In the most recent survey to which I have access, a small CBS News survey from l997 that tapped only 60 black women, 88% of the black women said they had a favorable opinion of the women's movement, compared to 64% of the white women, and 60% said the women's movement had achieved something that had made their lives better, compared to 42% of the white women. Regarding women's organizations, 90% of black men and women gave the National Organization for Women a positive rating in l989, compared to only 68% of whites.

These survey data establish a firm pattern of greater support for the feminist movement among black women than among white in the years l971 to l992, and continuing support today. This pattern is, however, not well known. It was first reported by bell hooks in l981 and is examined here for the first time in detail. The sentiments of the general population -- primarily nonactivists -- were probably not widely reported because in any one survey the numbers of black women were often too small to report, because the pattern of nonactivist black support for feminism contradicted the pattern of participation in the largest feminist organizations, because early in the movement black women activists sometimes denounced or were distinctly ambivalent toward the feminist movement, and because the media consistently portrayed feminism as predominantly white. Indeed, if recent data suggesting no current differences between black and white women in adopting the feminist label are accurate, one explanation for the convergence may be precisely the unrelenting media presentation of the movement as white for thirty years. In the early years the lead of black over white women in support for the movement was relatively robust. It appeared in many (although not all) surveys, and it has appeared no matter how the movement was labeled. It has appeared whether researchers asked about "efforts to strengthen and change women's status" (l970), "women's liberation" (l972), "feminism" (l986 to 1992), "the women's movement" (l986, l997), or support for the National Organization for Women (l989).

Why, in these national surveys, have black women traditonally given more support than white to the feminist movement? There are at least two possible reasons.

First, black women entered the paid labor force in large numbers earlier than white women. They were therefore the first to experience the "second shift" of responsibility for both home care and paid work. In the occupational "breakthrough" of the 1960s and 1970s, poorer black women moved overwhelmingly from domestic and agricultural to clerical work, leaving only 3% of all black women in domestic and agricultural work by 1988 (King l993). This movement combined with increasing problems in employment for black men without high-school or college degrees to produce a situation in which poorer black women were often the primary breadwinners for their families, even though the low pay for this full-time work still often kept their families in poverty (Jones l985). Among middle- and upper-class blacks, women by l940 had become only slightly less likely than men to graduate from a four-year college, and had kept close to parity with men from then intil l990, in contrast to the far higher rates of male graduation among whites. Yet their degrees did not bring black women parity with black men either in wages or in employment status. These experiences were likely to make black women of all classes sensitive to issues of gender equity.

Second, the experience of racial discrimination and the legacy of the civil rights movement gave both black men and black women a structural analysis of certain inequalities in the United States and an understanding of the need for collective action to combat those inequalities. Black men and women were, by and large, spared the kind of individualism that attributes every inequality to personal failures on the part of the less rewarded. Understanding the fact of racial discrimination helps one understand the fact of sex discrimination, and understanding the need for a civil rights movement helps one understand the need for a feminist movement. This is probably the reason that on surveys black men also tend to support the women's movement in higher percentages than white men.

Although their experiences with gender as well as race discrimination probably predisposed black women toward supporting feminist ideas, the context in which many black women came to their conclusions differed from that of many white women. That context included, among other things, the issue of independence.

Independence

In my fifth interview for the larger project from which this research derives, I was talking with a black woman in Chicago who had just left AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) about the closeness she had felt in her family of birth. I quote from that interview at length, partly because it alerted me to ask my later respondents about independence, but primarily because it raises most of the subthemes that surfaced later. As the mother described trying to pass on to her children the feeling of family closeness she herself had experienced, I asked how the men in her life might fit into this plan. She answered, in what seemed at first a non-sequitur:

T: I don't know. I've been told I'm too independent. They say my attitude's too independent, but --

J: Do you think you're too independent?

T: I've been told.

J: You've been told you're too independent. Who has told you that you're too independent?

T: Oh, men friends.

J: Men friends have told you that you are too independent?

T: Yeah.

J: What do they mean by that?

T: I think more my attitude, my attitude. 'Cuz a lot of times I, see, when I do things I like to do 'em and feel comfortable knowing, with knowing they're done already. I don't like to worry, you know. Instead of saying, "Well, you don't really need to pay it, you know, right now, you'll catch up with it," I don't do that. I don't do that. I pay it first, and then if something's left, or whatever, then, fine, we splurge. But, I just, 'cuz I feel if I don't take care of it, then I'll do without. I'll come up short, you know. It's gonna cost me later on. I can't afford it, so I have to do it like that. I have to do it like that. So I've been told, you're too independent, your attitude is just -- I can't help it.

J: So you think, you feel kind of, if you're taking care of it, you know that it's going to be taken care of?

T: Oh, yeah.

J: But if you're not taking care of it, someone else might not do it.

T: Exactly, exactly. I mean, you've got men that's responsible, but, so far, I haven't met one. I haven't met one that is. So -- You know, to each his own. I don't mean nothing, you know, toward everybody, but, for me, personally, I like to do it alone.

J: So what, concretely, would you do that made somebody say you're too independent? What would be something you do, some statement you made, or something?

T: I'll just take charge. I'll do it myself.

J: And they'll say, "What are you doing that for?"

T: Because it needs to be done; it needs to be done. And I'm the person to do it. I think I know more about it, or I may know what it needs, or I may know where it has to go, or who gets it, you know. You know all these things, cuz for me to sit down and just keep me explaining the same thing at bill time over and over again; I don't have to keep doing that. You know, I'd just rather just take charge and get it done. Cuz I don't like to worry about it. Like, oh my goodness. I can't help it.

J: So, at work, in a job, or whatnot, have you ever had that independence, you know, and has anybody ever said "That's too independent" when you were at a work, at any kind of work?

T: No, no, no, no.

Two interviews later I drew consciously on these words, and specifically asked, "Has anybody ever called you `too independent'?" Here is the response:

S: Yes, indeed.

J: What would be some examples, real examples?

S: My friend, my ex-boyfriend told me, he told me I should be the guy, cuz I think I know everything, and "You think you could do everything."

J: He didn't like that?

S: I mean, cuz I would, like, I would ask him to do something, and if it took him too long to do it, I'd get up and do it. And I might mess up halfway, but then he'd -- and then I also tell him -- I have a habit of telling him this -- "I don't need you for nothing. I'm gonna take care of me, regardless. Whether you help me or not, I'm gonna get taken care of." And, you know, a lot of guys don't like that.

As I continued the interviews, I began to ask most of the women with whom I talked the question, "Has anybody ever called you `too independent'?" As expected, I got very different responses from different people. But I also seemed to be picking up, I thought, something of a pattern among some of the black women I talked with.

When I asked the question of a young black teacher's assistant in New York City, she answered:

I get that all the time.... I live by myself. I support myself. I work, I go to school. Anything I need to do I do by myself. And in relationships I get it a lot. Like a lot, some of the guys I come across -- "You're so damn independent." I say "Yes, I am." I say, "I don't need you. There's a difference between needing you and wanting you. I'm with you because I want to be, not because I need you." I said, "What do I need you for?"

...[Regarding her last boyfriend] I said, "Why do I need to ask you? If I ask you, it's going to take forever to do it, so I might as well do it myself so I don't have a headache."

...[W]hen I do ask, I expect to get it done. I don't expect to hear a story or reason why you can't do it now or when I ask you to do it. If you've got to give me a story, forget it, I'll do it myself. That's why -- I know as a matter of fact -- last year, one instance was my sister went to school upstate, to college. I had went up once and we went shopping and I bought a stereo upstate. At the time I didn't have a car to get up there and get it and my sister's car wasn't working too well to bring it down. So I asked my boyfriend, "Can you go with me one Saturday and pick the stereo up from my sister's room?" "Sure." I waited and I waited, and I said, "When are you going to do it? It's sitting in her room taking up space, she's in a dorm room." "Well, we can go maybe Sunday." Saturday I called my other girlfriend and I borrowed her car and went up and got my stereo. I brought it back and my brother helped me carry it upstairs and I put it in the apartment. He comes over and he sees it and he says, "Oh, you went and got the stereo." I said, "Yeah, waiting for you I couldn't leave it up there forever." Then he says, "Well, you don't need me for anything." I said, "No. That's not -- if I'm going to ask you, then do it. Don't give me a story." If I get aggravated I'll do it myself.

A black woman police officer put it this way:

Let's say we're going on vacation or something -- or let's say I'm going on vacation. And I would say, "Are you going to take me to the airport? -- no, I'll take a cab. They do have cabs running." He'd say, "Oh, you're so independent." ... [Then] when he sighed a little and clicked his teeth, I thought, "The hell with you. I don't need you." I'm always telling -- they say I'm so independent, I don't give them a chance, or I never have to beg for nothing. You're damn right. Why should I have to beg? I don't beg anybody. I can take care of myself, not only financially, but other ways too. It's not just financially that I'm able to take care of myself. It's speaking up and not letting anyone run over me.

Another black woman police officer said that men tell her she's too independent "all the time." One told her:

"Well, you don't know how to ask for help. Why are you doing this yourself?" I said, "That's all right. I lose weight, I mow my lawn, I do what I have to do." ...I don't feel that I should grovel. I can't do that.

A black secretary in Missouri told me:

I guess I was [told I was] too independent because I prefer to do things myself rather than wait. Maybe I wouldn't accomplish it, or fit it. I may have to eventually call somebody to fix it but I would try to do it myself.

Some of the same themes surfaced among the low income white women I interviewed, but in most cases the contexts were slightly different. Only in one subgroup -- of Kansas farm women -- did a majority of white women answer affirmatively to the question "Has anybody ever called you `too independent'?". Of the seven Kansas farm women whom I interviewed, all but one said that they had been told they were too independent -- one by a father, irritated that his daughter had bought an '81 Mustang when he thought she should get something more sensible, one by a husband who wanted to be consulted on decisions in the house, one by a husband who was planning to open the door of the machine shed but on waiting a second too long found she had opened the door herself, and others by friends who thought their friend stayed home too much or by children whose friends did not have single mothers. The women told me that farm families are traditionally quite patriarchal, yet their reports also show that the lives of farm women are relatively autonomous. Perhaps this contrast produces high percentages of these women being told they are too independent. Yet, if their responses are at all typical, most of the reasons they offered differed from the reasons given by the black low income women with whom I spoke.

The group of thirty-nine women, black and white, whom I happened to ask this question were in no way representative. They derived from various "snowball" samples that began with my own friends. In this nonrepresentative group, a pattern seemed to emerge that made me want to look at it with a more systematic sample. First, among the women with whom I talked, the overall incidence of this experience seemed to differ not only by farm/non-farm experience but also by race: Of the thirteen black women I asked this question, eleven (85%) answered that someone had called them "too independent," but of the twenty-six white women, only twelve (46%) gave this answer. The pattern of reasons seemed to differ as well. Of the eleven black women who reported having been called too independent, eight (73%) gave reasons related to not wanting to "wait." Of the twelve white women, two (17%) gave a reason related to waiting. I did not discern a dominant reason among any other subgroup. Among the black women, nine of the eleven (82%) mentioned not needing a man, compared to four (33%) of the twelve white women.

Because my sample was not representative, I decided to put survey research to an unusual use -- investigating the incidence of a phrase in everyday discourse. In l993 and l994, I put a question on the Northwestern University Chicago Area Survey, asking, "Has anyone ever called you `Too independent?'" This survey taps a sample intended to be representative of the Chicago metropolitan area. The area has a socio-economic distribution much like that of the United States, but is distinctly urban and suburban.

To my surprise, the responses to this question revealed no relationship with class. I had expected people with low educations and incomes to report more often than others having been told they were too independent. This was not the case. But there was a relationship with gender and race, and in one subgroup an interaction with education. In approximate terms, about 40% of white men reported being told they were too independent, 45% of black men, 50% of white women, and 65% of black women. Among black women, those with more formal education were by far the most likely to report having been told they were too independent. Of the black women with a high school degree or less, only 55% reported that someone had told them they were too independent. With each increment of education the percentage went up, to the point at which 84% of black women with a college degree or more reported having been told they were too independent. If the individuals in this sample are reporting their experiences accurately, for black women the modal experience is to have been told you are too independent, whereas for white and black men the modal experience is innocence of this charge. Moreover, for black women in particular, it is as if their education and perhaps the more assertive attitudes that come with education pose a particular problem for others they encounter.

Zora Neale Hurston may have been reflecting her own experience as a highly educated black woman when she made Janie, the central character in Their Eyes are Watching God, depend almost completely on her husband for material support, but establish mental independence through her proud spirit and words of defiance. The reaction of Janie's husband to that spirit was to berate her: "Youse powerful independent around here sometime considerin'" (Hurston [l937] l990).

I discovered these systematic differences in gender, race and class in reports of being told one is too independent only after I had finished the in-depth interviews and could not probe the differences more deeply in the interviews themselves. I was, however, able to investigate the question a little more through the surveys, by looking at the relation of being told one was too independent to calling oneself a feminist, to being married or divorced, and to working fulltime in the paid laborforce versus working as a homemaker -- all relationships mediated by race.

Racial differences shaped most prominently the interaction between considering oneself a feminist and being told one is "too independent." Among black women, those who called themselves feminist and those who did not were equally likely to report having been called "too independent" (65% of the feminists reported having been called "too independent" and 68% of the non-feminists). Yet among white women, those who considered themselves feminists were noticeably more likely than the non-feminists to report having been called "too independent" (60% versus 45%). Among white women, whatever goes into calling oneself a feminist makes one almost as likely as the average black woman to be called "too independent." These associations do not tell us whether among white women feminism caused the acts which resulted in being called too independent, whether having people think of one as too independent caused one to become a feminist, or whether a separately caused cluster of attitudes and actions made one more likely both to be called too independent and to become a feminist. Perhaps feminism makes white women act more like black women and get called too independent, while black women just act independently whether they think of themselves as feminist or not.

There seem to be parallel, but not so strong, racial differences in how marital status and employment related to being called "too independent." Here too differences in status were more noticeably linked to differences in being called "too independent" among white women than among black. Married white women were considerably less likely than the divorced to have been told they were "too independent" (41% versus 73%), with the widowed and never married falling somewhere in between (59% and 60%). Black women show a similar but less striking pattern. Married Black women are somewhat less likely than the divorced to have been told they are too independent (70% versus 83%), with the widowed and never married experiencing a still lower rate (67% and 61%). Divorced white women may have had experiences that make them look more like the average black woman and less like the average married white, whereas black women may be more likely to have had similar experiences no matter what their marital history.

The effects of paid employment may also be a little greater among white women, although here the differences among races were too small to be statistically significant. Of the white women who had full-time paid jobs, 62% reported having been told they were "too independent," compared to only 31% of the part-time workers and 35% of the homemakers. The black women showed a similar pattern, with 77% of the full-time workers having been told they were "too independent," compared to 54% of part-time workers and 56% of homemakers. The small difference between the white and black women (a 29 point gap versus a 22 point gap), while not statistically significant, follows the pattern of the greater effects of marital status among white women.

We cannot be sure of the direction of causality in any of these instances. Presuming that women are called "too independent" because they act more independently, we can conclude either that, among whites and blacks, more independent women are less likely to get married and remain married, or that marriage reduces women's independence, or both (or that some third cause causes both effects). We can conclude either that more independent women are less likely to take on the job of full- or part-time homemaker, or that the position of full- or part-time homemaker reduces women's independence, or both (or that some third cause causes both effects). Whatever the causality, we can expect the effects of these dynamics, at least in the case of marital status, to be greater for white women, though how those dynamics work out in practice may differ by race, class, region, religion, and a host of other factors.

Being told one is too independent thus serves as one of many instances in which particular cultural groups have experiences that, while similar in some ways, are differently inflected, have different incidences, have different relations with material positions such as marital status and employment, and have different relations with political stances such as feminism. Because of these differences, members of specific race, class, ethnic, regional, religious and other cultural groups will often have specific issues that relate to feminist analysis which they themselves are the most qualified to explore, and which may pass completely unnoticed by the larger society or a larger subgroup of that society.

IV. The emergence of "feminisms"

From the l970s to the l990s, black feminist, womanist and international feminist thinkers have helped the women's movement devolve into a plurality of "feminisms," each grounded in the experiences of members of different groups and subgroups. This chapter suggests that investigations of these experiences should focus on non-activists as well as activists, because the two groups sometimes differ in their interpretations of the world around them. It also suggests that a few of these differences in experience can be captured by a combination of in-depth interviews and survey research, using the survey research unconventionally to measure everyday speech.

The survey question on being told one was "too independent," measuring an experience that originally emerged from in-depth interviews, revealed that exposure to this charge varied by gender, race and education. That variation in turn illuminates in a small way how each group of women, typically experiencing a particular constellation of structural forces, cultural patterns and social supports, must craft from its experiences its own approach to gender equality. If white women are typically trying to become more independent while black women are trying to parse out the complex patterns leading to the charge of being too independent, the language in which members of each group discuss the problems relevant to them will not be the same. Differences of class and race, along with differences in sexuality and other orientations, will mandate different sensitivities and stances in the struggle against male dominance.

In the collective identification and naming of problems, and in the crafting of solutions, some issues can be analyzed best by mixed racial groups, but others require analysis primarily by women who have had similar experiences, talking with one another in the kinds of "safe spaces" that the original consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement often provided their members. In the first decade of the second wave of the feminist movement, from l964 to l974, consciousness-raising groups brought the experience of deliberation in a safe space to many primarily white and middle-class women. That format was not useful for many black women, whose consciousnesses were already raised, who did not need the "click" experience, and who wanted to use what little time they could spare from their own and their families' struggles for survival to improve through concrete action their own lot and the lot of those with fewer privileges than they. By l996, black women's groups in the academy, organizations such as the National Political Congress of Black Women and the Black Women's Health Alliance, and journals such as Sage provide formal organization around black women's issues, while informal discussions proceed apace, fueled by the explosion in black women's writing.

On a far less formal level, the world is changing as much through what women like those I interviewed do and say as through organizational activity and governmental enactment. The hundreds of millions of women's daily micronegotiations -- with husbands, bosses, lovers and friends -- work within the local environment and are based on local knowledge. But these small struggles are informed by, and themselves inform, the larger understandings of justice and injustice by which all members of a culture -- black and white, male and female -- regulate their lives. As each woman, for example, deals with being told that she is too independent, and finds a way to respond in word and action that keeps her dignity, upholds her spirit and maintains the relations that she needs to survive, she shapes the normative world in which her daughters and sons will have to live. It is from that material that viable feminisms, with viable solutions to gender inequalities and gender tensions, will have to emerge.