Document 44: "Plank 17: Minority Women," from National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 70-75.
p. 70
PLANK 17
MINORITY WOMEN
Minority women share with all women the experience of sexism as a barrier to their full rights of citizenship. Every recommendation of this National Plan of Action shall be understood as applying equally and fully to monitor women.
But institutionalized bias based on race, language, culture, and/or ethnic origin or governance of territories or localities has led to the conditions of poverty from which they disproportionately suffer.
Therefore, every level of Government action should recognize and remedy this double discrimination and ensure the right of each individual to self-determination.
Legislation, the enforcement of existing laws, and all levels of Government action should be directed especially toward problem areas such as involuntary sterilization; monolingual education and services; high infant and maternal mortality rates; bias toward minority women's children; confinement to poor, ghettoized housing; culturally biased educational, psychological, and employment testing (for instance, civil service); failure to enforce affirmative action and special admission programs; combined sex and race bias in insurance; and failure to gather statistical data based on both sex and race so that the needs and conditions of minority women may be accurately understood.
Minority women also suffer from Government failure to recognize and remedy problems of our racial and cultural groups. For instance:
AMERICAN INDIAN AND ALASKAN NATIVE WOMEN:
American Indian/Alaskan Native women have a relationship to Earth Mother and the Great Spirit as well as a heritage based on the sovereignty of Indian peoples. The Federal Government should guarantee tribal rights, tribal sovereignty; honor existing treaties and congressional acts; protect hunting, fishing, and whaling rights; protect trust status; and permanently remove the threat of termination.
Congress should extend the Indian Education Act of 1972; maintain base funding of education instead of replacing it with supplemental funding; provide adequate care through the Indian Health Service; forbid the systematic removal of children from their families and communities; and assure full participation in all Federally funded programs.
ASIAN/PACIFIC AMERICAN WOMEN:
Asian/Pacific American women are wrongly thought to be part of a "model minority" with few problems. This obscures our vulnerability due to language and culture barriers, sweatshop work conditions with high health hazards, the particular problems of wives of U.S. servicemen, lack of access to accreditation and licensing because of immigrant status, and many Federally funded services.
BLACK WOMEN:
The President and Congress should provide for full quality education, including special admission programs, and for the full implementation and enforcement at all levels of education.
The President and Congress should immediately address the crisis of unemployment which impacts the black community and results in black teenage women having the highest rate of unemployment.
The Congress should establish a national program for the placement of "children in need of parents," preferably in a family environment, where the status of said children is affected by reason of racial or ethnic origin.
The President and Congress should assure Federally assisted housing to meet the critical need to black women, especially of low and moderate income; should direct the vigorous enforcement of all fair housing laws; and provide the allocation of resources necessary to accomplish this housing goal.
The President, Congress, and all Federal agencies should utilize fully in all deliberations and planning processes the Black Women's Plan of Action, which clearly reflects and delineates other major concerns of black women.
HISPANIC WOMEN
Deportation of mothers of American-born children must be stopped and legislation enacted for parents to remain with their children; citizenship provisions should be facilitated.
Legislation should be enacted to provide migrant farm working women with the Federal minimum wage rate, collective bargaining rights, adequate housing, and bilingual-bicultural social services delivery.
Classification of existing Hispanic American media as "foreign press" must be stopped to ensure equal access to major national events.
Additionally, the Federal Communications Commission must provide equal opportunity to Hispanic people for acquisition of media facilities (radio and television), and for training and hiring in order to provide Spanish-language programming to this major group.
Puerto Rican women emphasize that they are citizens of the United States and wish to be recognized and treated as equals.
p. 71
Background:
"The combined effect of race, sex and economic class
can produce extreme hardship…"
Minority[1] women have contributed immeasurably to the cultural life and economic strength of the United States. Moreover, their increased experience in recognizing and combatting discrimination, plus their greater need to seek employment outside the home, have often put them in the leadership of the struggle for equality for all women. Nonetheless, minority women have been ignored, stereotyped, or treated as invisible by media and historical accounts of the American women's movement. Their economic position places them in the lower socioeconomic stratum, in a high concentration disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Thus, the combined effect of race, sex, and economic class can produce extreme hardship in the lives of these American women.
Even obtaining accurate data about minority women's lives and needs becomes an object lesson in the multiple discrimination minority women face in a white male-dominated society. The U.S. Bureau of the Census has often been shown to undercount minorities and has assembled advisory groups from those communities to help devise more accurate statistics in the future. Yet the current figures are still the basis of formulating social policy, as well as the comparisons offered below. In addition, Hispanic groups are frequently reported as part of the white population, thus skewing both white and minority data, and statistical information is rarely broken out by race or ethnic subgroup plus sex. (See background on Statistics Plank.) The available information does give some idea of the special problems of the approximately 19 percent of all female Americans who are members of races recorded as other than white (including black, American Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Filipina, Korean, Hawaiian, Eskimo, Aleut and others) as well as Hispanic women (including Mexican American, Puerto Rican, Cuban and other Spanish origins.)
For these approximately 15 million minority women and girls, all the resolutions in this National Plan of Action have special significance. They often reflect needs that are even greater than those of white women. Some selected information in the areas of health, reproductive freedom, education, and employment is cited here:
Health. In 1975, the life expectancy for minority women was 72.3 years, compared with 77.2 years for white women. Maternal mortality was 29.0 per 100,000 minority women, as opposed to 9.1 per 100,000 white women. The infant mortality rate among minorities was 24.2 per 1,000 live non-white births as compared with 16.1 per 1,000 in the population at large. Poor nutrition is more likely to be a problem for the minority woman, as well as for the children she bears. She is less likely to see a doctor or dentist or to be covered by health insurance and is less likely to have access to a hospital or clinic within practical distance of her home. This lack of access to good or adequate health care is a function of economic status. It represents a clear example of the interaction of income with race and sex.
Reproductive Freedom. Minority women are less likely to have access to information, health care, and family planning techniques that make reproductive freedom a reality. Because of the disproportionate presence of minority women among poorer groups dependent on Federally funded health care, the recent restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortion are especially likely to increase the incidence among them of death and injury from illegal or self-induced abortions, as well as the incidence of unwanted births.
Restrictions on abortion also increase the potential of coerced sterilization through "bargaining": that is, allowing a woman to have an abortion only if she also agrees to be sterilized. Because of patterns and biases in the medical and birth control fields, as well as greater dependency on publicly supported teaching hospitals, minority women are more likely to be the subject of experimental medical techniques and drugs and more likely to undergo sterilization (both hysterectomies and tubal ligations) without informed consent.
Employment. The double discrimination against minority women ranks them below minority men and white men in earning power, as U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show. In 1975, for instance, the average minority female worker earned 26 percent less than the average minority male; and 43 percent less than the average white male. These figures become more meaningful when it is realized that minority women account for 28 percent of the 7.5 million families headed by women.
In addition, unemployment rates for minority women in
general persist at considerably higher levels than those for white women and
minority and white men. For example, their unemployment rate was 13.3 percent
in 1977 compared with the 7.8 percent rate of their white counterparts. This
disparity is most pronounced among teenage women. The unemployment rate for
female minority teenagers, for instance, was 39.0 percent in 1976.
p. 72
In March 1977, only 45 percent of employed minority women were in white collar jobs, compared with 66 percent of employed white women. About 23 percent of employed white women were working in the generally higher-paying, professional-technical, and managerial positions, compared with 18 percent of minority women. Sixteen percent of employed minority women were in the lower paying operative occupations (e.g., assemblers, inspectors, semiskilled factory workers) compared with 10 percent of white women.
Median income for all white families in the United States was about $15,620 in 1976. The median for minority families was $9,817. For families headed by women, however, median income was $8,226 for whites and $5,140 for minorities. In general, minority women tend to be a necessary support of larger households, and/or to be married to men with lower incomes, thus producing a greater pressure on their earnings.
One-third of all families headed by women are below the poverty level. Proportionately twice as many families headed by black and Hispanic women live below the poverty level as families headed by white women.
Education. Minority women as a group still receive somewhat less formal education than white women. White women aged 25 and older had completed 12.4 years (median) of school in March 1977, for instance, compared with 11.7 years for minority women in the same age group. In March 1977, 64 percent of minority women workers had graduated from high school, including 12 percent who had completed four or more years of college. The comparable figures for white women workers were 77 percent and 15 percent, respectively. The important fact is, however, that minority women with high school or higher education levels still receive lower salaries than comparably educated white women and lower salaries than minority and white men with much less education.
These limited examples are only indications of a profound problem. Specific factors combine to have greater and different impact on various groups of minority women. The following sections address special problems and social patterns in the major groupings of minority women.
American Indian and Alaskan Native Women. The American Indian/Alaskan Native population is the smallest minority group in the U.S.; about one million, or less than one percent of the total population. Many of its members assert, however, that it is also the most undercounted. About half of this population lives on tribal reservations or in Alaskan villages. These are the poorest of all the minority groups. On reservations, where the unemployment rate is over 60 percent, many families have no recordable income at all, and average annual family income is between $300 and $500. These families also are in effect the wards of the Federal Government, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior controlling the water, mineral rights, and other governance of their land, as well as the administration of their schools. The U.S. Public Health Service is frequently their only medical resource.
There are 789 different tribal entities within the U.S. Traditions and beliefs vary greatly: in some tribes, for instance, women play a much more powerful role than they do in the dominant American culture; in others, a lesser role. Women's identification with their tribal nations is often strong. The 1970 census figures indicate that for half of all Indian women, a tribal language is primary, with English as a second language.
Nonetheless, American Indian/Alaskan Native women share many overall, cross-tribal concepts: a fundamental identification with the land, for instance, and a view of the individual as an integral part of the community and of an interrelated system of nature that is a circle, a whole.
Due to health and social problems, Indian men are outnumbered by women 97 to 110. According to a 1969 U.S. Department of Labor report, more than 36 percent of all Indian women had no incomes. Of the remainder, 86 percent received less than $5,000 a year and half received less than $1,697. Among those in the labor force, only two percent have administrative or managerial positions. In 1970, their unemployment rate was 10.2 percent: double the rate for all women. They also average 10.5 years of education, as opposed to 12.1 years for all women, and only 34.6 percent complete high school. In reservation families, the children may be removed by Government authority to be raised in outside schools, families, or institutions, sometimes without the informed consent of relatives. According to testimony given at a hearing held by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in January, 1978, Indian women are more likely to be sterilized than other women including other minority women.
In addition to problems experienced as women, American Indian/Alaskan Natives share their group's special concerns: the deprivation of hunting, fishing, and whaling rights for instance, that may diminish or eliminate the group's chief food supply and a center of its traditional economy, and the appropriation of traditional lands.
In spite of many handicaps, including their severe, sexist stereotyping in American films and popular culture, American Indian/Alaskan Native women may have leadership positions and experience in decision-making as a result of more egalitarian tribal customs. A national communications network is being developed among them as a result of their participation in the Houston Conference.
p. 73
Asian/Pacific American Women. This group is highly diversified, including, women of Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Indonesian, Thai, and Malaysian origins, as well as Pacific Americans such as Samoans, Guamanians, and Native Hawaiians. Because more detailed information and statistics have been kept about the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino populations, these three groups are often inaccurately used to represent all Asian Americans.
In addition, official statistics on Pacific Americans are sketchy and often more than eight years old. Taken together, according to Bureau of the Census figures, these groups number about one percent of the U.S. population. Their percentage of the total American female population cannot be calculated according to the usual ratios, however, because of certain anomalies in immigration patterns. The Exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924, for instance, ruled that Chinese males could not bring in "alien" wives, thus insuring an unequal sex ratio that still continues. Filipino workers brought into the United States, frequently as migrant farm workers, suffered a similar restriction. Anti-miscegnation laws also kept many immigrants from marrying white American women, thus limiting the community and distorting family patterns. The Filipino community is still predominantly male. But among Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese groups, large numbers of women arriving as brides to U.S. servicemen have made recent immigration predominantly female. About half of all Asian American women now in the U.S. are foreign-born.
In addition, there has been a history of legislation restricting the immigration and/or citizenship of persons of "Asiatic" origins. Detention camps established during World War II also had a destructive impact on the welfare of many Japanese families, often depriving them of livelihood and land.
Manipulations of female-male relations and family patterns have created special tensions for many Asian/Pacific American women. Most dramatic is the plight of so-called "war brides," more than 300,000 of whom arrived from Asian countries immediately following World War II and whose influx continues. In 1973 alone, more than 7,000 transracially married Asian women, many of them Vietnamese, entered the United States. Regional studies indicate that such women often suffer from problems of language and cultural barriers, isolation even from other members of their communities in the United States, and, perhaps disproportionately, from abandonment and wife-battering. One study of Fort Lewis, a military reservation near Tacoma, Washington, for instance, indicates that between 200 and 500 Asian-born wives live in the area, as well as between 1,500 and 2,000 deserted or divorced wives of military men. When these women leave their husbands, are divorced or abandoned, they often experience even more economic, linguistic, racial, and cultural problems on their own behalf than they did as Asian-born wives.
Many Asian/Pacific Americans experience tensions between the attitude toward them as women inside and outside their communities. The habit of valuing a daughter less than a son is often stronger within the traditional Chinese community, for instance. On the other hand, some experience a higher status, whether because of the greater educational attainment among Filipinas, on average, than among their counterpart men (due largely to the recent influx of Filipina health professionals), or because of the greater status afforded to women by many native Hawaiian and other Pacific American groups.
About 50 percent of Asian American women are in the labor force. Levels of unemployment are slightly lower, and educational levels slightly higher, among Chinese American and Japanese American women than among white women. In many Asian American communities, there is also a strong tradition of order, self-governance, and business enterprise. Facts such as these have led to the frequent view of Asian/Pacific Americans as a "model minority" with few problems. In popular culture, Asian American women have been stereotyped as subservient to men or as "dragon ladies." This has served both to conceal and perpetuate such realities as the confinement of many Asian American women to a garment industry with sweatshop conditions (San Francisco's Chinatown has the highest tuberculosis rate in the country, for instance); their disproportionate employment in clerical, health and service professions, in spite of high educational attainment; their median income (in 1969) of only $2,931; and the isolation produced by language, culture, race, and the lack of political power.
Black Women. (Also see the Black Women's Action
Plan, in the appendix of this report. The Action Plan was the consensus of the
several Black Caucuses that met before and during the Houston Conference, and
provides additional background research.) According to the Bureau of the
Census, there were nearly nine million black women in the U.S. in 1977. Black
women have been diligent in their quest for self-determination and equal
opportunity, working.
p. 74
In 1977, the median income of black women was approximately $6,000 less than that of white men. Proportionately more black women are employed than white women in low-paying, low-status jobs and remain unemployed at a rate double that of white women and more than double that of white men. Unemployment remains especially high among teenage black women. Large numbers are high school dropouts, unskilled and untrained. If present trends continue, many of these young women will become heads of households facing the problems of raising families and working at low-paying jobs or not working at all.
A 1974-75 National Urban League report indicates that one of every four black women is unable to find work. Among black families headed by females, 43 percent are below the poverty level but do not receive any support from welfare programs. They rely primarily on earnings from low-paying jobs rather than public assistance. Many families headed by black women are forced to utilize public assistance as a way to supplement income from very low-paying jobs. The median income of families headed by black females in 1977 was $5,069.
Negative conditions continue to affect black women in many areas of their lives—health, housing, lack of access to credit, education—and in the care of their families and children. Roughly 6.4 percent of all black women held college degrees, according to the 1977 Census. The impact of those degrees is not felt in economic gain. They still receive lower incomes, sometimes less than those earned by white males who have not completed high school. For example, in 1975 a white male high school graduate earned $10,726 as opposed to $8,960 for a black woman with four or more years of college.
However, education still remains one of the principal methods of increasing economic choices and social mobility among blacks. Affirmative action and equal opportunity requirements relating to females are complicated by the variable of race, often causing black females to be counted twice in fulfilling affirmative action goals, while in actuality they receive only partial benefits. Public higher education for young black females is imperative because in most cases their families cannot afford private education. If this avenue of public education is blocked, the impact will be great on both black women and black families.
Poor health, substandard housing, and inadequate child care impact severely on black women who are poor. Discrimination and lack of enforcement of fair housing laws continue to deny black women and their families access to decent housing, a necessity for sound family development.
Black women recognize the gains they have made but are very much aware that they must obtain many more to "catch up" to where white women have started from. Alliances are being formed with minority women of other groups and the larger society of women in general to advance their goals.
Hispanic Women. According to the Bureau of the Census, in March 1977 there were 5.7 million women of Spanish origin in the United States. These include persons of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban origin, as well as Central or South American, and other Spanish-speaking areas.
Hispanic women are younger than those in the overall population. In 1976, for instance, their median age was 22.2, as compared with 29.9 for non-Hispanic women. This fact increases their need for reproductive health services, as well as for educational facilities and child care. Female-headed Hispanic families tend to be larger than those headed by non-Hispanic women. Family size combines with a higher rate of unemployment, a lower educational level, and lower incomes to trap more Hispanic women into the cycle of poverty and the self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. In 1977, for instance, 37 percent of Hispanic Women over 25 had completed high school, compared with 64.4 percent of other women.
Often restricted by language as well as by cultural, racial, and economic bias. Hispanic women are even more likely to be concentrated at the low end of the job ladder than are non-Hispanic women. Of all women employed fulltime by the Federal Government in white collar positions, only 2.2 percent are Hispanic.
Within this Hispanic population, the three largest groups are those of Mexican American, Puerto Rican and Cuban origin.
Mexican American Women. Even when taken separately from other Hispanics, Mexican Americans constitute the second largest minority group in the United States. Though they are often stereotyped as migrant workers—and they do constitute the largest proportion of migrants in general, as well as of female migrants—44.4 percent live in central cities.
Chicanas complete an average of 10 years of school, about
two years less than do women in the population at large. In 1976, about 71
percent of Chicanas earned less than $5,000 a year. Low-paying, low-skilled
jobs contribute to their low annual income: at $2,925, it is the lowest among
all women of Hispanic origin. They are also the largest single ethnic group.
p. 75
In March 1976, 17.2 percent of all Mexican American families were headed by women. Of those female household heads who worked at any time during 1975, 60.3 percent had earnings below the poverty level.
Because they have often entered the United States at the Mexican border—and may be assumed to have done so illegally, whether or not this is actually the case—Chicanas are often the subjects of checking, questioning, and threatened or actual deportation by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. Though reliable deportation statistics are not available, there are documented incidents of Chicanas who could not provide "adequate" proof of citizenship or immigrant status, and were speedily deported, leaving their American-born children behind.
Puerto Rican Women. The 1977 Census shows 1.7 million Puerto Ricans in the United States. Of these 934,000 are female. Puerto Rican women complete an average of 10.1 years of school; 24 percent attain a high school education; and only two percent are college graduates.
As with other Spanish-speaking women, Puerto Rican women are often disadvantaged by lack of bilingual services and programs. This has a direct effect on their educational attainment and employment opportunities.
Nearly half of Puerto Rican women participate in the labor force are operatives and service workers. Of those Puerto Rican women with incomes, 66 percent earn less than $5,000. Data indicate that in 1976, 38 percent of Puerto Rican families in the United States were headed by women, a percentage substantially above the national average of 13.3 percent.
Cuban American Women. The Cuban origin population is estimated to be around one million. In educational attainment they stand somewhat higher than other groups of Hispanic women. However, bilingual and bicultural education and services are a priority for them. Adjustment of legal status and slow procedures in immigration matters continue to be obstacles to their full integration into employment and political life.
1Members of the Minority Caucus in Houston agreed that "minority" was a more popularly understood term—and more accurate in the United States context—than "Third World" or others.
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