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dehumanizing treatment of black women in general. Reminiscent of Cooper and other nineteenth-century black women feminist-abolitionists, she exposed the racism of white women and reminded them that it was in their own selfinterest to work for black women’s liberation “inasmuch as the super exploitation and oppression of Negro women tends to depress the standards of all women” (Jones, 12). Her prophetic call for the women’s movement to embrace an antiracist agenda anticipated similar pleas by black feminists two generations later. “A developing consciousness on the woman question today ... must not fail to recognize that the Negro question ... is prior to, and not equal to, the woman question; that only to the extent that we fight all chauvinist expressions and actions as regards the Negro people, and [the] right for the full equality of the Negro people, can women as a whole advance their struggle for equal rights” (Jones, 15).
    In the 1960s, black feminist struggle came to the forefront in a more sustained manner and among a larger group, mainly as a result of the failure of the Civil Rights and women’s rights movements to address
the particular concerns of black women. Heightened consciousness about the confluence of racism and sexism in their lives was one result of their experiences with male chauvinism within the Civil Rights movement. In her autobiography, The Trumpet Sounds (1964), Anna Arnold Hedgeman describes her feelings about the male-dominant civil rights leadership and her experiences as the only woman on the planning committee for the 1963 March on Washington. When she discovered the omission of women as speakers on the program, she was appalled and wrote a letter to director A. Philip Randolph in which she alluded to black women’s important roles in the Civil Rights movement. She also argued that “since the ‘Big Six’ [civil rights leaders] [had] not given women the quality of participation which they [had] earned through the years,” (Hedgeman, 179), it was even more imperative that black women be allowed to speak. The outcome, according to Hedgeman, was that on the day of the March the wives of the civil rights leaders and a few other black women were asked to sit on the dais, Daisy Bates was asked to say a few words, and Rosa Parks was presented, but didn’t speak. Hedgeman’s response that historic day was one of disappointment: “We grinned, some of us, as we recognized anew that Negro women are second-class citizens in the same way that white women are in our culture” (Hedgeman, 180).
    In 1964, Mary King and Casey Hayden, white Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) staffers, discussed the sexist treatment of women in SNCC in a position paper entitled “Women of the Movement,” which they delivered at SNCC’s Waveland Conference. 10 Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, SNCC executive secretary (1966), died of cancer a year later at age twenty-five, and Kathleen Cleaver, a former SNCC worker and Black Panther, believed Robinson’s death was caused in part by overwork and “the constant struggles that she was subjected to because she was a woman” (Cleaver, 55). Similarly, Septima Clark, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) director of education in 1961, criticized the sexism of SCLC in her autobiography Ready From Within: “... those men didn’t have any faith in women, none whatsoever. They just thought that women were sex symbols and had no contributions to make ... I had a great feeling that Dr. King didn’t think much of women either ...” (Crawford, 195—96). She also confronted King about his nondemocratic style of leadership and eventually joined the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1968 because of its women’s rights agenda.
    The publication in 1970 of Toni Cade’s The Black Woman: An Anthology, Shirley Chisholm’s autobiography Unbought