What Is Higginbotham's Oppression?

Higginbotham correctly identifies two major fallacies of the traditional feminist historical lens that prevents it from being accessible to women of color. Her first issue is of the overwhelming omission of black female perspectives in mainstream historical analyses of gender which create an incomplete picture of gender oppression. Her indict of the new wave of feminist theories center around the problem of theorists “find[ing] little to say race.” Higginbotham’s extrapolations indicate that the lack of analysis done on the perspective of women of color ironically reproduces the very subjugation and repression of consciousness that many feminists hope to eradicate in the male versus female power imbalance. Her second criticism of the traditional feminist movement is of the “homogenization of womanhood.” Higginbotham describes this grouping as one that over simplifies the complex interactions of identities, creating one singular narration of women’s oppression. …show more content…
As evidenced by State of Missouri v. Celia, progressive legislation that appear to reduce gender oppression often covertly ignores racial oppression, papering over the needs and unique struggles of women of color. She provides the example of the shift of the Renaissance expectation of women and the Victorian expectation of women noting that these shifts in the western paradigm of women rarely spilled down to affect women of color, allowing for guises of progress and change to obscure the disproportionately distributed freedoms that eluded women of