The black women’s critique of history has not only involved them coming to terms with absences, black women have also been annoyed by the ways in which it has made black women visible. History has constructed their sexuality and femininity as deviating from those qualities with which white women, as prize objects of the western world, were bestowed. Black feminist have forever demanded that the persistence of racism receive acknowledgement as an arrangement feature of their relationships with white women.
Three concepts, which are central to feminist theory, developed into a concern in black women’s lives, the family, patriarchy, and reproduction. When used they are placed in a context of the experience of white women who are invariably middle class women and become inconsistent when applied to the lives and experiences of black women. The family can be a source of oppression for the black family, also in questioning how the black family has united as a prime source of resistance to oppression, and recognizing that during slavery, periods of colonialism and under the present authoritarian state. The black family has been a site of political and cultural resistance to racism. In addition, black feminist have trouble separating the two forms of oppression because racist theory and practice is frequently gender-specific. Ideologies of black female sexuality do not come about primarily from the black family. The way the gender of the black women is constructed differs from constructions of white femininity because it is also subject to racism (Heidi Safia Mirza 1998:45, 46). Much of the black women’s critique has highlighted the suppression within feminism of black/ white difference. This happens in one of two ways, the first that the rejection of difference, which is understood in the assumption that all women have particular interests in common. Looking at this closely, by all accounts worldwide interests tend to be those of a particular group of women. For instance, the pro-abortion feminist stance in the 1970s did not take into account the large numbers of black women’s reproductive struggles. Without proper consultation, and under the shadow of poverty, these were not experiences restricted only to black women, but it was the intervention of black women, which exposed this. Which now focuses on choice and reproductive rights, (Heidi Safia Mirza1998:71). Black feminists expressed that the right to an abortion and contraception was often less relevant to them as they struggled for their rights to have children and against sterilization policies. In their everyday lives in a racist society, the issues that are immediate for women of colour are frequently different from the concerns of white women, (Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle 1992: 48).
The notion of difference has a long history in relation to western feminism. Even though feminist thinkers infrequently used the word, the degrees to which women were the same as or different from men, and divided by factors such as class, formed the basis of debate about their roles, their rights, and their goals in the nineteenth century society. Subsequently, second-wave feminists have openly used this expression to voice the inequalities and disadvantages that women experience. When compared to men, and in revaluing some aspects of femininity, which previously was ignored, until recently, difference has been used by western theorist, referring to the differences between women, rather than just between two genders. There have been two formulations of this, one, which focuses on the diversity of experience, the other concerned with difference as informed by postmodernist thinking. Focusing on black women’s experiences highlights the ways in which race plays an important part in their social and economic positioning. Evidence suggests that race significantly affects black women’s experiences of treatment in areas such as education, the health service, and the labour market. The influence of race on how black women receive representation in popular culture and the mass media has also been demonstrated, (Haleh Afshar And Mary Maynard 1995:14). Taking into account different racial stereotypes, it can be seen that the principal of gender roles; such as stereotypes about the dominant Asian father and the dominant black mother or stereotypes about black men and women as sexual studs. These all indicate the reliance on gender traits for identifying ethnic difference, in looking at specific gender links between ethic and gender divisions in employment and reproduction. Afro Caribbean women tended mostly to work in Britain as service workers in manufacturing and nursing. Afro-Caribbean men tended to work in construction or the buses. A sexually differentiated labour market will structure the placement of subjects according to sex but ethnic divisions will determine their subordination with them so, for example, black and white women may both be in a lesser within a sexually differentiated labour market but black women will be in a lesser position to white women within this. Evidence suggests that within western societies, gender divisions are more important for women than ethnic divisions in terms of labour market subordination. In employment terms, migrant or ethnic women are usually closer to the female population as a whole than to ethnic men in the type of wage-labour performed. Black and migrant women are already disadvantaged by their gender in employment that it is difficult to show the effects of ethnic discrimination. The location of black women in the labour market reflects and compounds the dimensions of inequality intrinsic to British society, (Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis1992:111,112). Irrespective of race feminist thinkers and historians have pointed to the ways in which work seems to privilege the men’s experience over women’s; to the ways in which women have been denied access on equal terms to paid work, and to the ways in which definitions of work exclude women’s contribution. Historically, home and work have not always been separate. It was only with the emergence of industrial capitalist production that they became spatially separated and even now, the separation is not complete. Women have always been part of the informal cash economy that co-existed with the development of formal production in factories and other specialized workplaces. Women have always done domestic work for no financial reward; the significant shift was not from leisure to work but from homework to employer-employee working relations, (Ray E. Pahl 1992:123). In conclusion, gender inequality refers to the various differences in status, power, and prestige enjoyed by women and men in various contexts. Feminist approaches reject the idea that gender inequality is somehow natural. Black feminists have seen factors such as class and ethnicity, in addition to gender, as essential for understanding the oppression experienced by non-white women.