When and Where I Enter

Paula Giddings’s 1984 book, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, surveys Black female social and political activism from the antebellum days of slavery to the civil rights movements of the twentieth century. Living at the intersection of race and gender inequalities, black women and their contributions to social reform in the U.S. were long omitted from mainstream histories. Giddings’s non-fiction narrative corrects this oversight. Underpinning her study is the notion that black women’s struggles against the dual oppressions of racism and sexism situated them to be singular, if unsung, agents of change in American culture.

The book begins with the story of an 1892 lynching in Tennessee and Ida B. Wells’s subsequent lifelong anti-lynching campaign. Wells, educated but not affluent, owned the weekly Afro-American newspaper The Memphis Free Speech. She responded to this mob murder of a prosperous black grocery store owner by tenaciously investigating more than seven hundred lynchings in the South. Her resulting editorials exposed the racist impulse underlying lynching: to exterminate noncompliant blacks. For her courageous outspokenness, Wells received threats and had to leave Memphis.

Giddings then traces the development of slavery in colonial America from disparate forms of servitude involving lower class whites and blacks to an institution of forced black labor. Even in the earliest days of black slavery, there were black women resistors. Female slaves might abstain from sex to prevent producing more human capital for slave-owners, or they might induce abortions. Their role as field workers informed the identity of female slaves, and accordingly, their understanding of womanhood differed from their privileged white counterparts. In particular, black women, working side-by-side with male slaves, felt a degree of gender equality that most white women rejected. By the latter half of the nineteenth century, white culture had embraced “the cult of true womanhood,” which defined the true or “good” woman as submissive, pure and indivisible from her domestic and moral duties. This patriarchal social structure impugned women whose work went beyond their own families. Thus, black women fell short of “true womanhood” in the majority culture, because the slave system coded them as labor, as well as a sexualized commodity, and so “impure.”



The conflation of purity, womanhood, and whiteness divided black women from white and complicated any coalition politics. In 1866, Susan B. Anthony, a white woman, together with Frederick Douglass, a black man, formed the American Equal Rights Association to agitate for black and female suffrage. But cooperation between the sexes and races broke down when the Fifteenth Amendment only offered suffrage to black men. Afro-American female activist Sojourner Truth opposed the amendment, but most black women supported it as a means of uplift for their whole race. White women activists, on the other hand, objected to putting black male voting rights ahead of their own.

The primary focus of the book is the period from 1890 to 1945 when black female activism in American history was most organized and effective. After the Civil War, black men aspired to solidify their identity as free men entitled to the prerogatives of patriarchy, including male dominance. But chronic employment challenges due to low-wage white immigrant labor and racist union policies undermined black men’s efforts to support their families. So, black women remained active in the labor market and even participated in organizing efforts to secure equitable pay. Moreover, Giddings writes, by the 1880s, “Black women were ready to begin institutionalizing their claims to economic, social and political equality” (71).

Such “institutionalizing” took the form of organizations, clubs, and schools. In 1886, Lucy C. Lane, the daughter of a slave, established the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute in Augusta, Georgia. Mary McLeod Bethune taught at Haines Institute, and then founded her own school. But while growing numbers of Afro-American women were receiving educations, most were still trapped in menial jobs and poverty and were increasingly frustrated by black leaders’ failure to improve their plight. Black women rallied to their own defense. In 1892, women in New York and Boston formed black women’s clubs dedicated to promoting the progress of both blacks and women. Soon, such clubs proliferated across the country.



In 1896, partly as a consequence of Ida B. Wells’s anti-lynching campaign and her tireless activism, the National Association of Colored Women was formed with Mary Church Terrell as its president. This association was the first of its kind in that it was by black women and for black women, and not otherwise ancillary to a black male or white female organization. Within twenty years of its founding convention in Washington, D.C., “the NACW represented 50,000 women in twenty-eight federations and over 1,000 clubs” (91), writes Giddings. While most women actively involved in the NACW enjoyed unusual economic and educational privilege, their work reflected their ambition to elevate less fortunate black women and their children. Accordingly, the NACW lobbied for federal funds to establish kindergartens and advised clubs to organize day nurseries.

Giddings argues that the organizing activities of black women, necessitated by race and gender-based marginalization, positioned them as the vanguard of the civil rights and feminist movements of the twentieth century. Increasing, if uneasy, collaboration between black women and white realized universal female suffrage, as well as New Deal opportunities for blacks, and continuing gains on the labor front. Some black women, like millionaire entrepreneur Madame C.J. Walker, transgressed traditional gender roles, while others, like Rosemary Parks, defied racial prescriptions. Ella Baker, a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Council and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, was integral to the 1960s rise of Martin Luther King Jr. and non-violent black resistance.

A commitment to female equality has constantly influenced the activism of black women, but they’ve prioritized race over gender issues when necessary because racism has jeopardized their very lives. This has contributed to ongoing mistrust between black and white feminists. But as Giddings asserted in a 1985 interview, “In fact, we belong at the center of both the struggle for black rights and women’s rights.”