The best books about racial politics and women’s activism in the United States

By 2007, I had been studying movements for women’s rights and racial justice for 4 decades. This book inspired me to rethink the chronology and trajectory of both. All Bound Up Together highlights the ways, beginning in 1830, that Black women’s rights efforts were central to the Black freedom struggle and early American feminism. It recasts both stories by putting Black women’s concerns, ideas, and organizing at the center.    

Schuller’s book critiques the elitist and racist views of well-known white feminists from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Sheryl Sandberg and highlights a counter-politics created by women of color and poor and trans women. The author explores as well white feminists who embraced the latter’s intersectional vision. Each chapter examines two contemporary feminists. I found the comparisons of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances E. W. Harper, Pauli Murray and Betty Friedan, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs especially powerful. (The author’s discussion of Jacobs draws on letters she wrote to her friend and ally, Amy Post.) Schuller presents a powerful critique of one version of white feminism and an equally powerful vision of a racially-inclusive intersectional feminism. 

Thavolia Glymph analyzes the many ways that women—white and Black, enslaved and free, North and South—sought to promote or constrain the radical transformations promised by the Civil War. She interweaves well-known stories of white nurses and teachers and northern white feminists who labored to expand their claims on the nation with the lesser-known efforts of free, fugitive, and self-emancipated Black women and poor and working-class white women to ensure that the war led to greater liberty. Even some plantation mistresses became more politically active in efforts to impede Union military campaigns. This powerful book expands our concept of activism, forcing us to rethink its many meanings, sites, and goals in times of crisis. 

Cathleen Cahill explodes the conventional history of women’s suffrage by tracing the stories of suffragists of color from 1890 to 1928. Analyzing the efforts of African American, Native American, Mexican, and Chinese American activists, Cahill shifts the focus away from each group’s interactions with white suffragists and explores, instead, the commonalities and differences among women of color. She interweaves compelling vignettes of individual suffragists, including Carrie Williams Clifford, Nina Otero-Warren, and Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, with the larger issues addressed in their communities. In wielding dynamic analyses of these communities of color, Cahill creates a powerful new narrative of the long fight for women’s suffrage.    

Radical Sisters does for the 1970s what I tried to do for the nineteenth century—to show that while Black and white women activists usually worked separately and embraced different and often opposing priorities, some women forged interracial alliances to address shared concerns. Valk also reminds us that divisions among white feminists and among Black liberationists could be as contentious as those between the two groups. By focusing on Washington, D.C., the population of which was over 70 percent Black in 1970, Valk ensures the centrality of race to every issue she analyzes. Providing in-depth case studies of anti-poverty movements, welfare rights, lesbian separatism, anti-sexual violence, and reproductive rights, Valk shows how these movements shaped each other as well as the limits of and possibilities for forging truly interracial coalitions.