"Women's Lib Has No Soul." So proclaims the cover of the latest issue of Encore, the black newsmagazine. Inside, an essay by Psychologist Rose Finkenstaedt condemns the feminist movement as "little more than the hysterical exhibitionism of spoiled children." To blacks, adds Editor-Publisher Ida Lewis, Women's Lib is merely "a playtoy for middle-class white women." At first reading, Encore's broadside sounds too extreme to reflect the outlook of more than a few blacks. But in interviews with TIME correspondents across the nation last week, many black women agreed with the magazine's stand. Although black women are perhaps the most oppressed members of their sex, they are generally the least enthusiastic about Women's Liberation.
Black women have a simple explanation for their coolness toward the feminist movement—they believe that they are oppressed not by black men but by white society. As a result, most of them prefer to confine their crusading to such basic questions as employment, housing, education and the psychological effects of discrimination. "To black women," Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm sums up, "picketing a club restricted to men or insisting on the title Ms. are not burning issues."
Even the more important Women's Lib causes, such as abortions on request or the Equal Rights Amendment, fail to stir the black community. To many blacks, explains Jean Noble, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women, "abortion is genocidal, a method of limiting the black population. Muslim groups, for instance, say that the role of the black woman is to produce warriors for the revolution." Of the Equal Rights Amendment, Noble says, "I call it the liftin' and totin' bill. More than half of the black women with jobs work in service occupations; if the amendment becomes law, we will be the ones liftin' and totin', so passage of ERA is not our first priority."
Black women also find it difficult to identify with a movement that is essentially a middle-and upper-middle-class phenomenon. Florynce Kennedy, one of a number of blacks who belong to the feminist group NOW, points out that a vast number of blacks still exist close to the poverty level or even below it. Snaps Black Actress Val Gray: "I can't address myself to the problems of a woman in Highland Park [a white, upper-middle-class Chicago suburb] when she is trying to get out of her kitchen and I'm in her kitchen as a maid."
Sheila Young, executive editor of Essence magazine, agrees. "We haven't had the comforts to get tired of. We haven't had the big house or the country club to bore us." In fact, when black women express discontent with their female roles, it is often because they already have more liberation than they want. They tend, however, to call it responsibility, since they frequently work not by choice but out of the need to support their families.