Feminism

Toni Cade Bambara

INTRODUCTION

Black feminism of the sixties and seventies grew from the foremothers of feminist thought, recognizing their varied levels of consciousness and oppressions: race, gender, socio-economic status, and sexuality. It was a bourgeoning field of discourse in an attempt to reconcile the new forms of benevolent and hostile sexism that they were encountering in black and white society. In the middle and late 1960's tension in the black community was fueled by the Moynihan Report and sexism within black freedom movements. Black woman were attempting to debunk the myth that their strength, born out of necessity from racism, was the demise of the black community. The unresolved issues of this ere fueled more tension in the early 1980's for black woman writers, who came to represent the strength of black womanhood. The work of Michele Wallace, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison were being called into question as being divisive and anti-black male. Maya Angelou described it as the white media dividing and conquering. It is hard to separate the work of Toni Cade Bambara from the time periods she wrote through. She recognized that black society was “at war” and the characters in her short stores are the response to that. Without the historical backdrop her work is ground-breaking. Within this context it’s revolutionary.

BAMBARA’S CHARACTER AS A METAPHOR FOR BLACK FEMINISM

As Elizabeth Muther, Associate Professor at Bowdoin University, points out the “Bambara girl narrator/protagonist – represents the adolescence of black feminism (Muther, pg. 3).” The character of Hazel in Raymond’s Run shows the potential development of the black feminist movement. She is a self-determined, responsible, true to herself, and confident young girl. At the beginning of the story she is singularly focused on winning the May Day race which keeps her from developing a relationship with the new girl in the neighborhood, Gretchen. As the reader is introduced to Gretchen, Hazel ponders “…that girls never really smile at each other because they don’t know how and don’t want to know how and there’s probably no one to teach us how, cause grown-ups don’t know either (Bambara, 1972, p.26).” The parallel to this in the black feminist movement can be described through Michelle Wallace’s 1975 claim that:

"Despite a sizable number of black feminist who have contributed much to the leadership of the women’s movement, there is still no black women’s movement, and it appears there won’t be for some time to come. It is conceivable that the level of consciousness feminism would demand in black women wouldn’t lead to any sort of separatist movement, anyway…But for now, black feminist, of necessity it seem exist as individuals...each stranded for the moment working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle.” - Michelle Wallace

The inability to develop a black female consciousness movement, the inability to be able to smile, is what Toni Cade Bambara saw at the beginning of the movement. She is optimistic, however, that a movement can develop. By the end of the story Hazel no longer cared if she won the race, but is concerned instead in cultivating talent within her brother, possibly with the help of Gretchen. This realization grew out of mutual respect for each other’s ability between Hazel and Gretchen. At the end of the race Hazel notes that “we stand there with this big smile of respect between us. It’s about as real a smile as girls can do for each other, considering we don’t practice real smiling every day…” Through the text it can be inferred that Toni Cade Bambara is hopeful that the isolation of black feminism will end and unity will develop; that black women will practice and master smiling at one another.

COMMITMENT TO FEMINISM

In 1970 Toni Cade Bambara edited and published The Black Woman: An Anthology making it the first major feminist anthology. Without a doubt it was a monumental product of the Black Arts Movement . The book represented an array of black female activism, reflecting the diverse nature of Toni Cade Bambara’s works. She describes the anthology as:

“a beginning – a collection of poems, stories, essays, formal, informal, reminiscent, that seem best to reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary black women in this country.”

The collection included Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Abbey Lincoln, Toni Cade Bambara, and others. The anthology is interested in creating a space for all third world women to be able to contribute. True to the myriad of identities of black women, the anthology features professional writers to women who were never interested in publishing. In doing this the anthology presents the black feminist movement as an antithesis to the white feminist movement that was centered in academia, which is one of the many ways it excluded black participants. The genesis of the anthology, Bambara says, "grew out of impatience with the lack of writing for African-American women by African-American women.”

Toni Cade Bambara was correct in foreshadowing the anthology as a beginning. It can mark the start of a new era of black feminism that focused on ending sexism, racism, and imperialism. For Bambara capitialism causes racism and sexism: "in a capitalist society a man is expected to be an aggressive, uncompromising, factual, lusty, intelligent provider of goods, and the woman, a retiring, gracious, emotional, intuitive, attractive consumer of goods" (Black Woman 102). The preface to the anthology lays out the goals of the black feminist movement. One of the main focal points was black women’s ability to create an identity for themselves, to debunk the myths of the black matriarch and the black bitch. The first words of the anthology deal directly with this problem:

“We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitive and dehumanizing system of racism from the manipulative control of a corporate society; liberation from the constricted norms of “mainstream” culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly form without (reaction) rather then from within (creation)."

Through the establishment of a self created identity, the anthology and the subsequent black feminist movement focused on creating an exchange for all third world women, creating a usable black women’s history from the known to the unsung, finding alternatives to public schooling, examining economics and the idea of cooperatives, and looking into areas of sexuality.