North Carolina Office of Archives and History

The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the FeministMovement by Winifred BreinesReview by: Wesley HoganThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (JULY 2007), pp. 346-348Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23523082 .

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346 Book Reviews

appendix of thirty-nine ministers who were serving as president or secretary during those years. Letters to the Negro World and a few oral histories provide the scarce and

much-needed voices of black southerners.

Rolinson's data positions thriving UNIA divisions in the rural South. The author

herself recognizes the limits of her potential and warns early on that the publication she

uses most is strong propaganda for Garveyism. Therefore, the published letters selected

by the editor of Negro World probably are cherry picked to support Garvey's position. Without their voices, we cannot be certain why rural southerners joined the UNIA or

preserved self-pride and self-determination. Perhaps they just wanted to be informed of

what an important black intellectual of the era was saying. Rolinson has clearly raised

interesting questions not previously considered by other scholars.

Rolinson joins the group of historians who have recently examined the components that strengthened the freedom struggle chain for southerners from Reconstruction to

the present. All reveal a connection to the black church, a willingness to resist, and

participation in grass-roots organizing as shared factors in the movement. In addition to

providing a new angle to the historiography on Marcus Garvey, Rolinson's monograph contributes another link in the black freedom struggle.

University of Nevada, Reno

Geralda Miller

The Trouble between Us: An Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement.

By Winifred Breines. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Acknowledgments,

introduction, illustrations, epilogue, notes, index. Pp. viii, 269. $29.95.)

Young women in the 1960s and 1970s lived through a time of raised expectations hard for today's youth to imagine: the end of racism, equality for women, an end to

heterosexism, and the hope that ordinary people could end a misdirected war. In The Trouble between Us, Winifred Breines tackles "the political and personal efforts to deal with race and racism by radical women." In doing so, she has two aims. First, she lays out "a tentative map" of detours and successes that "all Americans need as we negotiate

race in the years to come" (p. 18). Second, she hopes that future activists might avoid the "pain and disappointment of failed community" lived by black and white women in the 1970s (p. 201).

Breines, a pioneering sociologist at Northeastern University, was among the first to

untangle the internal dynamics of social movements in her 1982 book Community and

Organization in the New Left. There, she introduced a term that opened important terrain for scholars—"prefigurative politics"—describing the tension that activists

experienced as they tried to create a new world of equality, even as they lived in a

decidedly unequal world. The achievement proved far from simple. Since then, her small'd' democratic interventions, large and small, have reshaped the historiography of the 1960s. This includes her 1988 article, "Whose New Left?" published in the Journal of American History, and a 1995 anthology (with Alexander Bloom) on the 1960s, Takin' It to the Streets, used in many university courses.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 347

Breines needs every bit of democratic innovation to approach the historical task at

hand in Trouble between Vs. Activist and scholarly land mines abound. Chief among them: many white women were (and some continue to be) ignorant of black women's

experiences; and black women did (and some continue to) portray white feminists as

self-absorbed and politically oblivious. As a white member of the Boston socialist

feminist group Bread and Roses, Breines experienced such conflicts as an activist. She

thus has "not easily let go of a humanistic, universal, racially integrated sisterhood and

brotherhood ideal," even while recognizing that her romanticism was "less palpable

among African Americans" scarred by white terrorist violence and federal inaction

(pp. 9, 13). Why was there no racially integrated women's liberation movement in the United

States, she asks (p. 6) ? By exploring in depth black women's greater stake in racial unity, and white feminists' initially unrecognized class and race norms, she answers this

question in chapters 1 through 3. She spends the rest of the book examining the

"divided loyalties" that black and white women experienced as they organized on their

own behalf (pp. 87, 94). This section is particularly useful in documenting what black

and white radical women were able to achieve despite their differences: they campaigned

against sterilization abuse, violence against women, and legal discrimination; they raised

public awareness of the lack of childcare; and they worked to provide better mental

and physical health services for all women. It also reveals what did not work: white

demonstrations for Panther women, inclusion of black writings in women's anthologies, and outreach to black groups all failed to meet the goal of a multiclass and multiracial

women's movement (p. 115). Breines also documents the emergence of identity politics

and provides a detailed portrait of second-wave black feminism as a reaction against

white feminism, which those who study social movements will find useful.

Inevitably, scholars will question her focus on Boston women, her limited comparisons

to other regions, and her perspective as a white radical participant. Activists may

question her emphasis on writers, intellectuals, and conferences, compared to her

relatively brief examination of organizing strategies. (The work of Barbara Smith,

Marge Piercy, Ann Snitow, Sara Evans, Linda Gordon, Michele Wallace, and Marilyn

Frye has all emerged from the movements she explores.) As Breines points out, just because women began to recognize power differences

based on race and class, they did not necessarily know how to work cooperatively

despite those differences (pp. 108-109). For Breines, the trouble between "us" in the

title might have been even more usefully explored by co-authoring it with one of the

African American women from the Combahee River Collective. Still, Breines's

nuanced reflections on the use of oral history and memories, her evocative use of

movement photographs, and her call for more black women's voices in telling the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's history remind us of how fragile these

historical reconstructions actually are. Particularly effective are her analyses of how

Emmett Till's lynching affected black consciousness; how Stokely Carmichael's

"position of women is prone" comment influenced subsequent scholarship; and the

pain of the black community when black men and white women partnered within the

VOLUME lxxxiv • NUMBER 3 • july 2007

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348 Book Reviews

movement. These scholarly interventions provide clearer blueprints for future

generations. Most important, perhaps, she explores the loss of community experienced by both black and white women, and charts a path forward where "home is never simple," but whites and blacks are "able to imagine working and talking together in ways that

earlier feminists accomplished only after years of political work" (p. 195). Once again, Breines's scholarship rewards those interested in learning more about the complex interior of social movements and the practical mechanics of small'd' democracy.

Virginia State University

Wesley Hogan

Steel Driviri Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend. By Scott Reynolds

Nelson. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Acknowledgments, illustrations, maps,

notes, coda, index. Pp. 214. $25.00.)

Following a short account of the author's own motives and research methods, Steel

Driviri Man traces the John Henry legend backward through court and prison records to

a 5'1 14" New Jersey native arrested for burglary in Prince George County, Virginia, in

1866. While hard to picture as the swinger of even one nine-pound hammer, nineteen

year-old John William Henry makes a likely hero, pitting muscle and spirit against

hopeless odds in a series of wrong places in a very wrong time. A victim of "black codes"

passed and rigidly enforced in the brief period between the end of the Civil War and the

beginning of Radical Reconstruction, the man Nelson believes to have been the real

John Henry was sentenced to ten years in the state penitentiary in Richmond for a

crime he may not even have committed.

By late 1868, the young convict was in the hands of contractors working for the newly

privatized Chesapeake and Ohio (formerly Covington and Ohio) Railroad, the assets

(but not the debts) of which had been practically handed by federal appointees to

western railroad baron Collis P. Huntington. Anxious to drive westward through the

Allegheny Mountains, C & O contractors purchased convict labor from a well

meaning but poorly informed warden who believed that convicts would fare better in

the open air than in the overcrowded state prison. Contrary to the long-standing belief

that John Henry died in the Big Bend Tunnel, where steam drills were apparently never

employed, Nelson locates the legendary contest between man and machine in the Lewis

Tunnel, forty-two miles to the east. John Henry probably did win some sort of race

against a steam drill in 1871, but the question of whether he died as a direct result pales in the face of the revelation that well over one hundred other convicts did die, whether at the work site or back in Richmond, after breathing silica dust created by hand or steam drilling and subsequent nitroglycerin blasts. Even minimal inquiry into the deaths at the Lewis Tunnel might have saved the lives of up to seven hundred men, also

mostly black, who died under similar conditions at Union Carbide's Gauley Mountain Tunnel sixty years later.

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