Sojourner Truth’s speech, delivered at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention was originally an answer to White men doubting the ability of women to partake in politics due to stereotypical images of White womanhood (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 153). The speech perfect-ly introduces the problem of intersectionality as early as in 1851. Since then changes have been made, the situation of Black people in the United States now differs greatly from the Post-civil war period of the 19th century and even from the 1950s, which were marked by Jim Crow and wildly accepted racism of that time, as well as an atmosphere of violence and oppression. For women as well things have changed, the suffragette movements of Europe and the United States established political …show more content…
Although there are laws to ensure social equality and fair participation, racism and sexism still structure our societies and influence the opportunities people get, how they live, and what they are able to achieve. This is especially true in the case of Black women and other women of color, while for Black men racist oppression is central to their social status and for White women their oppression is merely patriarchal, the position of Black women is defined by both, racism and the patriarchal …show more content…
Androcentrism and ethnocentrism have characterized and shaped scholarship on the victimized, making psychological research on racism about Black men and psychological research on sexism about White woman, disregarding the reality of a large number of people affected by both forms of subjugation. Since the late 1970s a movement of women of color in law, scholarship, politics and literature is on the rise to make all these fields more inclusive and make room for both theorizing and researching about the particular situation of women of color. But in the psychological scholarship research on the impact of intersecting oppressions of women of color seems to evolve rather slowly. As a result, this literature re-view aims at answering two questions: a) how has psychological research on the psychological consequences of being a member of multiple oppressed group, more specifically a women of color, been conducted? and b) what are the findings thus