Women were an indispensable part of the movement that could often be found working behind the scenes or in the trenches along side the men helping to bring about social change through the movement. These revolutionary black and white women could be found putting their bodies on the line along side the men in protest at segregated lunch counters in small towns, on buses for the Freedom Rides traveling throughout the segregated south, as well as working door-to-door on voter registration dr

We must be careful to avoid the construction of a monolithic experience of women in the civil rights movement, for clearly women’s experiences within the movement were as differentiated as the number and types of organizations that participated in the movement. Nonetheless, when we hear the stories of women who encountered male chauvinism within the movement we should not be too surprised considering the history, constituency, and structure of some of the major organizations of the movement. When we examine the SCLC we see an organization that is religious in orientation and whose main leaders were black ministers and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had a long history of being a male dominated and extremely bureaucratic organization. But there is much more to the history of women’s involvement in the civil right’s movement than just their participation in the many large male led civil rights organizations.

Although women played extremely important roles within the civil rights movement and were involved at every conceivable level of the movement they often had to struggle to gain the respect of many of their male chauvinist peers who were still holding onto now antiquated beliefs. Nonetheless for many women their involvement in the civil rights movement was by far the single most rewarding,

Some topics in this essay:
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