Peggy McIntosh (born November 7, 1934) is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and Senior Research Associate of the Wellesley Centers for Women. She is the founder of the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity). She and Emily Style co-directed SEED for its first twenty-five years. She has written on curricular revision, feelings of fraudulence, and professional development of teachers. In 1988, she published the article "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies".[2] This analysis, and its shorter version, "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (1989), pioneered putting the dimension of privilege into discussions of power, gender, race, class and sexuality in the United States. Both papers rely on personal examples of unearned advantage that McIntosh says she experienced in her lifetime, especially from 1970 to 1988. McIntosh encourages individuals to reflect on and recognize their own unearned advantages and disadvantages as parts of immense and overlapping systems of power. She has been criticized for concealing her considerable, personal class privilege and displacing it onto the collective category of race.
Definitely want to read her Invisible Knapsack work.
Interesting mention:
With Dr. Nancy Hill, McIntosh co-founded the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute, which, for thirty-five years, annually gave “money and a room of one’s own” to ten women who were not supported by other institutions and were working on projects in the arts and many other fields.
Another example of Virginia Woolf’s idea being put into practice in the wild. (I added a link to the Wikipedia page to make it more obvious.)
