Women in Movement

Abstract This essay seeks to define the course of Brazilian black women's struggle within the national feminist movement. It questions the classic feminist perspective founded on a supposedly universal notion of woman that takes Western white women as its paradigm, obscuring the perception of the multiple intra- and inter-gender contradictions brought about by racial issues. Given these contradictions, black women are called upon to establish themselves as a new political entity, bearing a new agenda that derives from a specific identity wherein the variables of gender, race, and class interact, posing new and more complex challenges to our society efforts in attaining equitability of gender and race.