Discontented Black Feminist Argumentative Analysis

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In the weekly readings for week five we see two readings that talk about the connections between women’s suffrage and black women’s identities. In Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, we see the ways that black women’s identities were marginalized either through their sex or by their race. These identities were oppressed through social groups, laws, and voting rights. Discontented Black Feminists talks about the journey black feminists took to combat the sexism as well as the racism such as forming independent social clubs, sororities, in addition to appealing to the government through courts and petitions. These women formed an independent branch of feminism in which began to prioritize not one identity over another, but to look at each identity as a whole. This paved the way for future feminists to introduce the concept of intersectionality. When looking at Terborg-Penn’s article with the speech Susan B. Anthony gave in 1873, we see a contrast of feminist ideas. Susan B. Anthony speaks about the equality that women …show more content…

Anthony’s speech as a whole you get her message of overwhelming desire to claim that the entirety of The United States built the perfect union in which she so adamantly calls upon in the subject of Women’s Suffrage. Anthony insists that white male Americans weren’t the only persons to build the country she lives in, but women as well. She acknowledges the fact that the oligarchy of race in America is among the downfalls of the United States, but she argues that it is the oligarchy of men over women that truly is the greatest disgrace in American Society. This attitude toward race and sex limits the intersectionality it has between the two classifications by saying that identities are ranked. Anthony opposes the argument laid out by black feminists and Terborg-Penn’s article that claim identities are equally important and cannot be

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