Sidebar: Feminist movement excludes minorities

The debate over the role of minorities in the feminist movement has reached the University as well, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, director of the Women's Studies Program, said the University is still way behind in hiring minority women. Smith-Rosenberg said there are very few black women, no Hispanics and only a few Asians among the University's faculty. She added that part of the problem is that in the '70s and '80s, the feminist movement was dominated by white women. "We were so concerned with gender, that we didn't consider race," Smith-Rosenberg said. "Only later did we come face-to-face with the issue of women of color." And College senior Liesel Euler said that it was a mistake to overemphasize gender, since feminism can not be separated from other social injustices. Director of Victim Support Ruth Wells, who is black, said she has a problem with the exclusion of minorities and lower classes from the women's movement. "Educated women provided a strong componenet for change, but black women and poor women provided the 'foot soldiers,' " she said. Part of the problem was that white middle-class women received more attention simply because they were in more visible positions of power, Euler said. Wells said that different people had different roles in the movment. "The women's movement was kind of like the civil rights movement," she said. "Some were part of the destruction crew, others were part of the construction crew." But former Director of the Penn Women's Center Carol Tracy, who now works at the Women's Law Project, still feels that too many issues addressed by feminists focus around professionals rather than the working classes. She cites the recent Hyde amendment, which made it almost impossible for low-income Pennsylvania women to get an abortion because they can no longer use Medicaid. "Poor women lost their right to have an abortion, yet there was no outcry from feminists," she said.

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