color moving into their neighborhoods. In fact, conservative women modeled some of their tactics on
feminist activity, as when anti-abortion protesters copied New Left tactics such as sit-ins and chaining
themselves to fences.
Although Chicano (male) activists stubbornly resisted Chicana feminism, that did not stop the
development of feminist consciousness among Chicanas. At the 1971 Mujeres por la Raza conference in
Houston, a survey of the six hundred in attendance showed that 84 percent resented not receiving equal
pay for equal work, and 72 percent felt discriminated against within the Raza movement. In Chicago at a
meeting of a Latino/a American student group, one woman rebelled when the group’s president
announced, “ ‘The girls are going to go and prepare something [to eat] while we discuss this political
question.’ . . . I was single. I didn’t even cook. . . . Why the heck was I going to cook for some guys?
Cristina and I didn’t budge. . . . The rumor thereafter was that Cristina and I were lovers. . . . Then, they
started saying that we weren’t heavy chested and that made us more masculine. . . . From then on, we
raised issues . . . related to Chicanas.” They called a Latina women’s conference, La Mujer Despierta
(Women Awake), in 1973.^23
American Indian women had a history of leadership greater than that of other ethnic groups; women
led, for example, the first Indian activism of the civil rights era—the 1960s “fish-ins” defending tribal
rights. But with the Indian seizure and occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969–71, and then the 1973
occupation of Wounded Knee, male violent rhetoric and armed posturing, much like that of the Black
Panthers, accelerated, and women got sidelined—and began to criticize the men. After the Wounded Knee
defeat, Indian women founded Women of All Red Nations and campaigned against coerced sterilization
(see below) as well as sexism.
Asian American women traveled a different trajectory: the Vietnam War affected them strongly and
intensified their commitments to Asian American civil rights and anti-imperialist activity. They created
fewer distinctly feminist organizations but many centers and projects for women—cultural centers, health
clinics, battered women’s shelters; moreover, the Asian American New Left was less sexist and less
violent than were the black and Indian New Lefts.^24
Still, the nonwhite feminist groups also shared strategies: fighting racial/ethnic as well as gender
discrimination; pushing bread-and-butter issues. Major concerns crossed all racial ethnic lines: ending
rape, harassment and domestic violence; making reproduction control accessible to all; criticizing sexist
representations of women; honoring divergent family forms and sexual preference; insisting that women
get equal access to professions, jobs, salaries and promotions.
Another thing all feminists of color shared: denunciations by their racial/ethnic brothers. They
accused women of undermining already fragile male egos, fragmenting and thereby weakening civil rights
efforts, destroying families and damaging their children, losing their own culture, threatening community
solidarity, and accepting white women’s values. When Elizabeth Sutherland reclaimed her Mexican
American identity and her father’s name—Martínez—and moved to New Mexico to join a movement for
her own people, some of her compañero/as charged she was agringada (whitened) because of her
feminism. (This was a bitter irony for the girl who had had to sit in the back of the bus in Washington.)
She criticized the use of images of “our women/ in postures of maternity, sadness, devotion/ tears for the
lost husband or son/ our women, nothing but shadows/reflections of someone else’s existence/
BASTA!”^25 She saw, moreover, that her sister Chicanas had plenty of resentment about their own
experience of male dominance; in rejecting feminism they were primarily rejecting a movement they saw
as white and middle-class, and they also saw the need for male-female solidarity in fighting anti-Mexican
racism. The relative strength of feminism among women of color seems to have been correlated with the