Intersectionality in Feminist Movements: A Deeper Look
How feminist movements have learned to address overlapping forms of discrimination—and why some women's voices were left out for decades.
- Intersectionality means understanding that a person's identity is shaped by multiple overlapping categories (race, class, gender, sexuality, disability) that create distinct experiences of discrimination.
- Early feminist movements often centered white, middle-class women's concerns, leaving Black women, immigrant women, and poor women behind—a pattern intersectionality exposed.
- Modern feminist organizing that ignores intersectionality risks repeating the same exclusions and building movements that don't actually serve all women.
Intersectionality is the idea that a person's identity isn't made up of separate, stacked categories—gender, race, class, sexuality, disability—but rather that these categories interact and overlap to shape how someone experiences the world. A Black woman doesn't experience sexism and racism as two separate problems; she experiences a particular form of discrimination shaped by both at once. The term itself was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, but the concept emerged from decades of Black feminists pointing out that mainstream feminist movements were ignoring their realities.
Why Early Feminism Left Women Behind
The first-wave feminist movement in the late 1800s and early 1900s fought for women's right to vote and own property. But it was largely led by white, educated, middle-class women. Black women were often excluded from these spaces—sometimes by explicit policy, sometimes through the simple fact that organizing happened in white neighborhoods and churches. Meanwhile, Black women faced not just sexism but also racism, Jim Crow laws, and economic exploitation that white women didn't experience. When the 19th Amendment passed in 1920, it granted voting rights to women—but in practice, Black women in the South were blocked from voting by the same literacy tests and poll taxes used to disenfranchise Black men.
Similar gaps existed for other women. Immigrant women, Latina women, and poor women of all races had different priorities than affluent white women: they were fighting for labor rights, access to birth control in their own communities, freedom from police violence, and protection from workplace abuse. But these issues weren't centered in mainstream feminist discourse, which meant the movement's victories didn't necessarily help them.
How Intersectionality Changed Feminist Organizing
Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, Black feminists, Chicana feminists, and queer feminists began explicitly naming what was wrong. They argued that feminism couldn't be one-size-fits-all—that movements had to understand how racism, economic inequality, and other systems of power shaped women's lives differently. This wasn't a complaint added on top of feminism; it was a fundamental rethinking of how movements should be built.
An intersectional approach means asking: Whose voices are in the room? Whose concerns are being centered? If a movement fights for equal pay but ignores that women of color and immigrant women are concentrated in the lowest-wage jobs, it's not actually addressing equal pay. If a movement fights for reproductive rights without acknowledging that poor women and women of color have historically been coerced into sterilization, it's missing part of the story. Intersectionality demands that movements start with the most marginalized women's experiences, not add them in later.
Intersectionality in Practice Today
Modern feminist movements that take intersectionality seriously look different. They're led by people from multiple backgrounds, not just one. They address issues like police violence against trans women of color, the wage gap between white women and women of color, immigration enforcement's impact on women's autonomy, and how disability intersects with gender. They recognize that a trans woman's experience of sexism is shaped by transphobia, that a disabled woman's experience is shaped by ableism, and that an undocumented woman's experience is shaped by immigration policy.
But intersectionality isn't just a checklist—it's a way of thinking. It means power-sharing in organizations, not just diversity in membership. It means being willing to follow the leadership of the most affected communities, even when their priorities don't match the priorities of more privileged women. It means recognizing that one policy solution won't work for everyone, and being willing to fight for multiple victories instead of a single compromise that helps some women while harming others.
Why This Matters Now
Intersectionality matters because feminist movements that ignore it tend to replicate the same patterns of exclusion. Without it, movements can accidentally advance the interests of privileged women while leaving behind the women most in need of change. A movement for equal representation in boardrooms doesn't help women in poverty. A movement for paid family leave doesn't help undocumented workers who can't access it. And a movement that centers the concerns of cisgender, straight, able-bodied women will inevitably leave behind those who don't fit that description.
- Kimberlé Crenshaw's original 1989 case: Black women suing General Motors for discrimination. The company hired women (white women) and Black people (men), but not Black women. Courts said there was no discrimination because women and Black people were hired—missing the point that Black women faced a unique intersection of both.
Sources
- Kimberlé Crenshaw, 'Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,' University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989.
- The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) — foundational Black feminist text articulating the need for intersectional analysis.
