A Boston demonstration, 1979, led by the Combahee River Collective. Photograph by Ellen Shub.
The development of separate feminisms among African Americans, Latinas, Asian Americans, and
American Indians did not weaken the overall force of the women’s movement. Political scientist S. Laurel
Weldon has shown, in fact, that women’s movements were stronger and more successful when there were
multiple groups organized by racial/ethnic and other identities.
Feminist activism among women of color and white working-class women often took forms rather
different from the white and middle-class projects that are usually identified as feminist. Some developed
as labor struggles, such as the victorious two-year strike (1972–74) of garment workers at the Farah
Company in El Paso, Texas; four thousand Chicana workers defied violent intimidation, sparked a
national boycott of Farah clothing, and won union recognition. In 1969, four hundred hospital workers in
Charleston, South Carolina, won a dramatic 116-day strike sparked by the firing of twelve black aides for
attending a grievance meeting. As one striker, Bessie Polite, said, “We was women and we didn’t have no
weapons. . . . I felt like they wouldn’t hardly hit us with those big clubs.” To which Ernestine Bryant
added, “When you’re working around people who discriminate against you . . . they call you like ‘hey,
girl,’ . . . you just really feel like—you know—fighting.”^21 These labor struggles and other feminist
campaigns by working-class women gained support from the Coalition of Labor Union Women; founded
in 1974, the group arose from the intersection of long-term pressure by women within the AFL-CIO with
the influence of women’s liberation.
Much women’s activism focused on children, and the converse is also true: movements for children
are typically women’s movements. This kind of activism was not new, but the women’s movement
energized it. Women campaigned for better garbage collection, traffic lights, guards at school crossings,
parks and playgrounds and swimming pools. Women were frequently the leaders of campaigns against
toxic wastes in their neighborhoods. In 1978, Lois Gibbs, a working-class mother only twenty-seven
years old, discovered that her son’s elementary school was built on top of a toxic waste dump. At first she
thought that she “just had to go to the right person in government and he would take care of it.” She
remembered being very upset to find that “democracy isn’t democracy,” and added, speaking with
familial feelings of betrayal, “It’s like finding out your mother was fooling around on your father.” She
then started a movement that forced the cleanup of Love Canal and led to the creation of the “Superfund”
for environmental safety.^22 Not all women-led campaigns were praiseworthy, for it was also women who
protested public housing, halfway houses, school desegregation and busing, and even harassed people of