Anne Valk's Radical Sisters offers a compelling account of the interactions between grassroots movements advocating for the rights of women and African Americans in Washington, DC in the 1960s and 1970s. Through vivid and detailed descriptions of the fight for welfare rights and reproductive control, and against homophobia and sexual violence, Valk's cultural history provides a welcome relief from the theorizing that has tended to dominate academic discussion of feminism in recent years.
Valk's challenge to feminism concerns itself not with its possible contamination by essentialism or “quasi-essentialism,” but rather with the extent to which it was a movement able to accommodate issues of racial and economic injustice – issues that both touch on and also push beyond feminism's most obvious interest: women. By providing detailed case studies of the ways in which civil rights, student and anti-war movements intersected with second-wave feminism, Valk aims to nuance existing scholarship that she claims has “typically … treated the histories of these movements separately” (4). In addition, Valk's contribution offers a corrective to the tendency of much of this scholarship to perpetuate “a declension narrative that correlates the birth of feminism with the dissolution of other left movements and stresses the decline of radical feminism in the mid-1970s” (4). Instead, Radical Sisters demonstrates how feminist coalitions built upon and in turn influenced other leftist movements, anticipating future constellations of radical organizing.
Examples of these new forms of activism that evolved from this period of intense political activity are the “distinct black and Third World feminist movements” that Valk points to in her conclusion (186). Valk identifies the movement against sexual violence as a key precursor for these new developments. This movement surfaced disagreements between black and white women over the position of black men vis-à-vis sexual violence. Rejecting the line that all men are would-be rapists, many African American women involved in this movement were keen to stress the ways in which black men have historically been oppressed by the same sexual economy that oppresses women, particularly black women – whose abuse at the hands of white men has been overlooked while black men could find themselves confronting a lynch mob if they so much as looked at white women. Many white feminists were, in the view of a number of black female activists including Angela Davis, colluding in this sexual economy with its origins in southern slavery by perpetuating “the myth that black men were the most frequent sexual offenders” (171).
Thus Valk's narrative, rather than seeing black feminism as heir to the legacy of a fabulated “white feminism,” shows that black women were key shapers of feminism from the beginning, which, while harbouring racist currents, was never a “whites-only” affair. In this sense Valk's account takes on both the antagonisms and the points of agreement between different sections of the feminist coalition. The expectation one gets from reading the book's introduction – that the narrative to follow might be an all-too seamless story of feminist cooperation – is thus subverted.
What is missing from Radical Sisters is a sense of where it fits in with, and the extent to which it challenges, existing accounts of feminism. The book presents its readers with a wealth of description that is rarely contextualized by critical commentaries other than Valk's own. This lack of a comparative angle is mirrored in the book's focus on Washington, DC. While this location is significant for obvious reasons – among them its proximity to the federal government and the city's large African American population – Valk does not go far in underscoring this significance, neither does she offer many comparisons with other strands of the national or international movement to contextualize her choice.
That said, at a moment when the potential clash between gender and race politics has become headline news as a consequence of the presidential election, a thoughtful and nuanced account of the intersections between race, gender and class is a timely intervention.
