"We, black women, do both."

If white women in America were discriminated against and undervalued, black and minority women were even more so. If one needed any more proof that the women's liberation movement was not monolithic, one needn't look further than black feminists.

The so called "double jeopardy" situation dealt with by black women would be a tough burden for anyone to bear. However, it simply wasn't in the best interest of many African-American females to join the ranks of their white counterparts in the burgeoning movement.Writer Celestine Ware described why:

Feminist goals, like abortion on demand and easily obtainable birth control, are viewed with paranoid suspicion by some black militants at a time when they are literally fighting for their lives and looking everywhere to increase their numbers.

Of course, these militants were predominately male, and their suggestions that "their women" not use birth control in order to populate were not taken well by many women. For them, they had been seen as nothing more than breeding machines by slave masters in the past, and were now seen as the same thing by their lovers and husbands, although for different reasons.

When the nationalist Black Unity Party declared that "none of the sisters should take the pill [so that they could produce more black warriors]," a group of black women responded:

If we practice birth control, it's because of poor black men ... who won't support their families, won't stick by their women ... Poor black women would be fools to sit up in the house with a whole lot of children and eventually go crazy, sick, heartbroken, no place to go, no sign of affection -- nothing.

Indeed, social and economic disparities left many of these women with precisely that -- nothing. And black men were clearly just as insensitive to the needs of black women as white men were to those of white women: Chauvinism is truly colorblind.

Photo: New York Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first African-American woman to fun for president of the U.S. c. 1967.