Thank you Lucille for your expansive view of what women experienced before second wave feminism and how that relates to what other groups have faced in trying to achieve respect for our humanity. Your vignette of the career of a black woman who became a physician and then a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst encapsulates the struggles she faced as so many others of her generation and generations before hers faced in the United States. By being classified as black she was treated as a member of a devalued group. It was seen as legitimate to exclude, exploit, beat, maim and even kill members of that group just for being black. The same was true for women.
In earlier times in the United States when black people were enslaved, they and their labor were valuable to their enslavers (I cannot bring myself to call those people their “masters”), it was not permissible to kill them because they were property. Ironically, becoming free made them prey to being murdered. Ironically also black women were and are less likely to be murdered by whites than black men were and are. They were still seen as valuable property, not dangerous, but useful.
In the United States the racial laws were more draconian than in any other country. Even a person with a single black ancestor, a single great-grandparent, was and is legally defined as black. Marked as black, like being defined as female, meant and means accepting deference to white males.
The achievements of a black woman who became able to use her talents as an instrument to help children overcome similar difficulties are important especially because they can inspire others to identify with her and develop their own talents to help others.
By including homosexuals in the groups excluded and devalued Lucille
has widened the scope of our discussion again. There is a history of changing values in this sphere. While the Greeks of Plato's time valued man to man love above heterosexual love, and in other times it was considered part of love, neither more or less valued than heterosexual love, homosexuality has been considered criminal or shameful or both in the past two centuries in the West. The argument was that it was their choice so they should be held responsible for it. The homosexual community argued that it was not a choice but an inborn impulse for some people and was therefore just as legitimate as was heterosexuality for most people.
What Lucille did not bring up here is the more recent trans-gender and genderless identity groups that have become the latest group in American society to object to being marginalized and devalued. Here the argument has been that socially imposed gender denies the individual freedom of choice of self-expression.
I think that for all of these groups the agenda is two-fold, just as it is for women. Equality of opportunity and respect for difference are on all of these groups' agendas. At the moment in our country I am proud of what we have achieved and aware that we all still have a far way to go to achieve these simple goals.