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Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism. By Nancie Caraway. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991. xii + 282 pp. Cloth, $42.50, ISBN 0-87049-719-7. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-87049-720-0.)
Why has the feminist movement -- the reform movement perhaps most sensitive to notions of hierarchy and domination -- remained a "segregated sisterhood"? In this provocative book, Nancie Caraway identifies reasons of both theory and practice and then offers her own remedial vision.
In the section of the book that critiques black feminist theory, Caraway, a white feminist, bemoans the "monist analyses" that still prevail in feminist thought and that ignore the reality -- and much of the scholarship -- of women of color. It is the latter's understanding of multiple oppressions ("theory of the flesh," Caraway calls it) that has provided "new knowledge about the world," knowledge whose validation enlarges our "assumptions about the very nature and function of...