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Helen Jackson Claytor is most remembered for her civil rights work, particularly in interracial relations and integration. In the early 1940s, she conducted a study on the interracial relations of the YWCA. The subsequent report eventually led to the adoption of the "One Imperative" which vowed to end racism "wherever it exists and by any means necessary" (Letter to National Conference of Black Women). In the 1950s, Claytor was instrumental in the founding of the Human Relations Commission in Grand Rapids, MI, which tackled racial discrimination in the city. In the late 1960s, she was the first African American elected president of the National YWCA. During her six years in office, she oversaw the adoption of the "One Imperative" and continued to improve interracial relations in the organization. Yet, although much of Claytor's activism was focused on race work, she did so from a woman-centered perspective. Her mission for racial equality was undergirded by her own identity as a woman, mother, and Christian. Ten years before the beginning of the second wave feminist movement, Claytor was advocating, and modeling, the multifaceted role of women as homemaker, wage earner, and active citizen. She also strove to strengthen women's power and influence in the workplace, politics and society. Despite her contributions to women's rights, however, contemporary and current representations focus primarily on Claytor's race work,1 resulting in a narrow representation of just one part of her multifaceted life.
Such one-dimensional representation is indicative of the flawed larger narrative of women's rights history. The second wave women's movement, as illustrated in scholarship like Personal Politics, Moving the Mountain, and The World Split Open, (Davis; Evans; Rosen) is framed almost completely by the work of white women and their organizations. According to these accounts, the second wave was precipitated by discontentment among housewives during the 1950s; sparked by President Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women in 1961, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963, and Casey Elayden and Mary King's "Memo" in 1965; it officially began with the formation of NOW in 1967. Under this portrayal, the movement was organized by middle-class white women in response and as solution to problems experienced only by the privileged class.
African American women, on the other hand, are depicted as...