The Long-Distance Runner | Historical Context

The Long-Distance Runner Historical Context

Gender and Racial Prejudice

In the nineteenth century and through much of the twentieth century, when white middle-class women worked for gender equality, many of them refused to make alliances with women of color or with poor women. While all women experienced unequal treatment, African American and Native American women faced the additional oppression that white women exerted over them. This pattern of exclusion by white women was measurable in the so-called social agencies designed to improve women's lives. For example, the Women's Christian Temperance Union denied membership to black women in the South, and the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) did not allow African American women to serve on its board. Even in the late twentieth century, this pattern could still be traced in the absence of African American women from some conferences on feminism, from professional associations, and from positions of power in universities and corporations. Toward the end of the twentieth...
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