Published in 2004
288 pages
Benita Roth (1961 – 2023) was Professor of Sociology and History, and Director of the transdisciplinary program in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Binghamton University. From 2010-2015, she also served as the associate editor for the Journal of Women’s History. Her first book, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave (Cambridge U. Press, 2004), earned the distinguished book award in sex and gender from the American Sociological Association. According to the awards committee, the book filled “a critical gap by…taking on the mainstream account that claims women of color came late to feminism.”
What is this book about?
This book is about the development of white women’s liberation, black feminism and Chicana feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, the era known as the “second wave” of U.S. feminist protest. Benita Roth explores the ways that feminist movements emerged from the Civil Rights/Black Liberation movement, the Chicano movement, and the white left, and the processes that supported political organizing decisions made by feminists. She traces the effects that inequality had on the possibilities for feminist unity and explores how ideas common to the left influenced feminist organizing.
