New York Times reporter Lynette Clemetson has added a new dimension to the “mommy wars” by describing the differences between black and white women's views on balancing work and family. Her recent Times article demonstrates how historical grievances between black and white women persist and continue to poison women's perceptions of each other.

“We don't generally have the time or luxury for the guilt and competition that some white mothers engage in,” said one black woman.

While some affluent white women worry that they didn't make their children's cupcakes from scratch, they argued, black women are preoccupied with what one woman described as the “kink coefficient,” or the extra time needed to groom black children's hair. These are some of the more superficial issues that women must confront, but it is clear that black and white women disagree on more important family decisions as well.

Many of the black women interviewed by the Clemetson saw their pursuit of a career as setting an positive example for their children whereas in contrast, an increasing number of surveys and studies that indicate that many educated white women view their careers as taking valuable time away from their children.

At first glance, it would seem that women of all races could find common ground on issues such as childcare, reproductive rights, and the prevention of sexual violence, but black and white women have disagreed on how to approach each of these issues. In fact, the feminist movement has been unsuccessful in uniting women across race and class on a long-term basis. Black and white women have rarely participated in interracial feminist activities, and when they did, they realized how segregated their lives were.

What caused these misperceptions among women? How did a movement that was supposed to create interracial coalitions end up causing deep and nearly irreparable rifts among women? Northeastern University sociology professor Winifred Breines examines these questions and the places where black and white feminisms converged and diverged in her meticulously researched book, The Trouble Between Us: An Uneasy History of Black and White Women in the Feminist Movement.

Breines traces the rift between modern black and white feminists to the Civil Rights movement, when white female college students came from the north to help black southern college students in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the summer of 1964, known as “Freedom Summer.”

“The SNCC story is crucial for understanding subsequent developments in gender consciousness among black and white women,” she notes. SNCC was an integrationist organization that challenged segregation laws in the South. Although the students took a united stand against racism, their different cultural and social backgrounds became apparent when a few white women expressed their displeasure with what they perceived was a male-dominated student activist campaign.

The women's displeasure quickly turned to outrage around the same time that SNCC leader and future Black Panther Stokely Carmichael stated (some say jokingly), “The position of women in SNCC is prone.”

Carmichael's remark and other perceived biases against women inspired white SNCC volunteers Mary King and Casey Hayden to write “A Kind of Memo: Sex and Caste,” in which they compared gender discrimination to racial discrimination, calling for all women to rise in protest against both. King, Hayden, and other white women in SNCC quickly discovered that black women were not as interested in staging a feminist revolt as they initially suspected. Many black women who were civil rights activists viewed the race and gender struggles as separate issues and believed that black and white women had irreconcilably different visions of gender equality. Freedom Summer made progress in achieving racial integration, but the trouble between the SNCC women signaled the beginning of the conflict between black and white feminists.

After uncovering the foundations of the feminist rift, Breines analyzes how women struggled to reconcile feminist ideas with their racial heritages. White women who were raised in the pristine 1950s middle-class suburbs wanted something more than to spend their lives keeping house and raising children. Meanwhile, black women in the South and northeast witnessed the spread of black activism amidst increasing racial violence and joined the struggle for racial equality, where they developed a strong sense of solidarity within civil rights organizations. As the Black Power movement evolved from the Civil Rights movement, discussions of integration were replaced by more militant and assertive declarations of self-determination and race pride. Black women, however, soon became frustrated with Black Nationalist rhetoric and became uncomfortable supporting men who did not respect them as equals.

Barbara Smith, a black feminist writer who would later found the Combahee River Collective in Boston, flatly stated that her life goals were not “to have babies for a Nation and to walk seven paces behind a man and basically be a maid/servant.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, there were periods when women united against issues of sexual violence and poverty reduction. Breines describes how Cambridge organizations such as Bread and Roses established women's centers offered childcare and other resources to black and other minority women, and how the interracial Coalition for Women's Safety protested to demand greater police protection of black women who were victimized by a serial killer in the Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods near Boston.

At the same time, more Afro-centric feminist organizations formed, and white and black feminists continued to diverge. The Combahee River Collective, a black feminist organization, celebrated black women for their beauty and intelligence. Through poetry readings and scholarly articles, black women such as Toni Cade Bambara and Sonia Sanchez emerged as public intellectuals and began to articulate their difference in a way that embraced their cultural heritage by advocating for the creation of broader, class-based Third world feminist coalitions. But even these coalitions eventually disintegrated as women realized that they could not solve so many complex social problems in one movement.

Breines' involvement with feminist organizations such as Bread and Roses allows her access to primary sources that make her book an important contribution to feminist scholarship. The task of suggesting how women should proceed in the feminist movement, however, is more difficult. If there is a way for women to balance the tension between interracial collaboration and a healthy respect for difference, it is not clear in Breines' book. “The puzzle is still in pieces because of the density of race and racism, the difficulty of overcoming racism, and the land mines that are set off by even talking about it,” she writes.

The Trouble Between Us could not have been published at a more relevant time, giving readers the historical background to contemporary debates about how race and class influence American feminism. The book successfully provides much-needed context for understanding the sources of the current fault lines between women of different races. It's unfortunate that black and white feminists couldn't work more closely together, and it is even more unfortunate that the divide seems to be growing deeper.

The outrage expressed by Durham, North Carolina residents and college students about the alleged rape of a black college student by members of the Duke lacrosse team, for example, transcends race and bares a striking resemblance to the ways in which women united against the serial murders of black women in Boston. But what happens to these interracial coalitions after the case is resolved is more important than what activists are doing now. If black and white women can only unite in what Breines calls “emergency” situations such as rape, it's not clear how effective their demands for racial tolerance and understanding will ever be.

LaNitra Walker is a doctoral candidate in art history at Duke University.