Intersectional Feminism: Crenshaw and Combahee River Collective

The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980, produced in 1977 a foundational document, the Combahee River Collective Statement, drafted principally by members including Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, and Demita Frazier. The Statement, later widely anthologized, including in Barbara Smith's edited volume Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), explicitly named what it called "interlocking" systems of oppression — race, class, sex, and sexuality — as operating simultaneously rather than as separable or rankable categories, and it is credited by many historians of feminist thought with an early and influential use of the phrase "identity politics" in something like its contemporary sense, referring there to the political legitimacy of organizing from one's own specific, multiply structured social position rather than treating any single axis of oppression, such as class alone or sex alone, as primary.