Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

Gender, like race, has been twisted into knots of both access and rejection. The movement for women’s suffrage succeeded, and the second wave of women’s rights seen in the Feminist Movement of the 1970s also yielded extraordinary change. Like people of color, women faced limitations on their very citizenship: the right to vote, to serve on juries, to work in the arena of their choosing, and the right to control reproductive choices. Through a series of movements, beginning with suffrage and continuing through first- and second-wave feminism, women built upon the compromises gained in earlier rounds. Yet, in each of these achievements, the intersection of race and gender left women of color behind, primarily Black women. Sojourner Truth voiced legitimate outrage in her “Ain’t I a Woman” tirade against a pale vision of suffrage, anticipating that the right to vote granted by the Nineteenth Amendment excluded Black women. Ida B. Wells faced rejection from white women when she brought attention to the lynchings of Black men and women. For Latinas and Asian American women in the West, not to mention Native American women, their womanhood did not guarantee entrée into the debates of feminist objectives.