Black Feminism in Britain Essay Example for Free

Black Feminism in Britain Essay Black feminism in Britain is a very strong issue. This topic could be addressed in so many ways, so I decided to address the issue through others writings. Black women have been pressing the issue of equality for a very long time now, and being black women presents a two -fold issue on equality. Being Black automatically make you a minority and being a woman takes away from your standpoint even more. This is why Hazel Carby feels that being just a feminist is nit enough; there are more issues than those that are addressed by whit feminist for the black woman. Hazel Cardy’s article White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood, examines the way in which feminist revisionist history has reconstructed itself by appropriating the power of privilege of the historiography in order to marginalize black women in their absences and misrepresent them in their presence. In my view, it is precisely the incorporation of feminism in the worlds system and power. The concern is not one with the feminist theory and more with the misuse and abuse of black women in Britain. Black women in Britain have had a lot of battles to fight to get to where they are today, and even today they are still not equal with men in society. The black women of Britain had to not only endure migration, but hey had to also endure loosing high education positions for lower paying jobs and many had to leave their families and come to Britain alone. They did come to Britain for the fast cars and big cities; these women came over to make a living so that their families could survive. They thought that they were coming to the land of opportunity, but when they arrived in Britain they were in for a rude awakening. There the push and pull factor that is present in this situation. In the Caribbean there were little to no jobs available and that is the push factor, the pull factor is tha t in Britain there were many jobs opening up for the people. The thing that many did not know, who made this journey, was that these jobs were the jobs that the British thought that they did not want to do. This entire process alone put the Black peoples on a lower level. Being that these people were also women they were even lower than so men were. In recent reassessments of Caribbean women’s political roles both during and after slavery suggest that their leadership was crucial to popular collective action throughout Britain. Many of these women were characterized as feisty females who were used as a joke to the public. This satire reduced women’s acts of resistance to individual willfulness. The historical record to the contrary indicates that the black woman of Britain emerged in the contest of the supportive networks of families, communities, and collective work groups. This resistance soon became known as black feminism. The history of women leader in Jamaica begins under slavery, and here we are introduced to the particular spokeswoman the petticoat rebellion, which was a name from a Jamaican slave owner to show just what he thought about the Black women rising up together. Assertions of special female prerogatives and criticisms of the abuse of women had extra resonance in the British Victorian setting, with its sharp delineation of boundary between the masculine and the feminine. A crucial aspect of laying foundation for subsequent oppositional cultures in Jamaica was black women’s promotion of a popular ‘voice’ both within the missionary churches and, more radically, by forming their won Afro-Christian religious association. Thus there became a third realm of opposition other than violence and hidden resistance. There became a movement. An early public challenge to black women’s subordination is the dissenting churches occurred in the Baptist congregation. Many women of color, including those who were illiterate, participated in activities of a public and political nature through their churches, including but not limited to elections and petitions. Even the relatively conservative Presbyterian Church required ever communica nt to vote for the elders, bringing non-white men into leadership. Popular democratic procedures, and participation meetings. By literate women were perceived as a threat to the English Missionaries control over the society. Young concluded his attack on democratic procedure by noting that the Kingston petitions were a kind of test case, part of a larger agitation for popular independent control of the churches, and the society must clarify its stance on the privilege of petitioning conference ‘. By making a formal distinction between home and foreign stations, the society sought to contain not only dangerous democratic currents, but also the women who exercised the role of leadership within their churches; a major difference between home and Jamaica, after all was the degree to which women as a matter of course ‘ discussed and decided all questions brought forward. Many examples of violent language recorded in the British records were spoken by women, whether during slavery and apprenticeship, or later courthouse riots, or scuffles, whe n violence occurred, working class women were often at the forefront using insults and provocations, and weapons as well. Many of those women were black. In an earlier reference I gave the example of a slave caricature that was use to mock slaves, the urban women carried on her hard-hitting tradition of political protest. Swithin begun to trace women’s participation not only back to the plantation labor but also urban riots. Even when riots rose in religious or cultural issues, the following example show that they were always political in so far as the demonstrated black physical power and numerical strength against representatives of the state. A new urban political culture was emerging on the streets of Kingston. The Family ties have been one important aspect of some women’s participation in the Morant Bay Rebellion. Many women were accused of throwing stones at the volunteers and burning down the courthouse. Black feminist were looked at very negatively in he eye of the British from white Jamaican joke to Quasheba jokes, that ridiculed strong black women, their speech, families, and working class culture. It rest on the ideology of white women as ‘angels in he house’, whose domestic life is heaven rather than the hell that the black woman had to endure, this parody arises a question, if they have black women on record cursing, where do we find the recorded ‘voices’ of these working-class black women in the historical record? Contrary to this fake ‘voice’ the actual records of protest that have been considered in this paper suggest that black family solidarity, and community self protection with the understanding of violence against black women came most often form the wider white society. The few preserved accounts of Afro-Jamaican women’s leadership and political protest exist precisely because of the contradictory position they occupied in the colonial symbolic mapping of social order and disorder. Their words speak for themselves, while their troubled embedding in government archives, and newspapers suggest their powerful impact.