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Volume

74

Abstract

This article confronts the mainstream feminist narrative that white women first addressed patriarchal violence en mass in the 1970s. Instead, this article traces back to Black women who advocated against lynching and sexual violence in the late 1800s as the first attempt to address systemic violence against women. They engaged in womanism, or the fight for Black people’s right to experience safety and discover a sense of wholeness. Their efforts led to the proliferation of numerous movements in the 1900s. Despite how crucial their efforts were to the formation of the feminist movement; many white feminists remained hostile and engaged in political whiteness. Political whiteness is displayed through narcissism, alertness to threat, and an accompanying need for control. This led white women to co-opt marginalized women’s experiences while not deconstructing white supremacist beliefs, leading to a racialized understanding of the systemic violence against women and a belief that the criminal legal system would address that harm. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA) and later Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), further co-opted these values by propping up the Victim Rights Movement through funding opinion studies and funneling funds to law enforcement. VAWA represents the problem of patriarchal violence as criminality. This exclusive focus on criminality makes the structural forms of violence invisible. In a race to be equal in a highly stratified society, white feminists ignored the threat present in VAWA. This article ends by challenging the political whiteness endemic in many feminist spheres and calling for movement building based in womanism and an intersectional approach.

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