Linda Burnham

“We started Black Sisters United, and it was basically a consciousness-raising group. We were struggling to understand what was different about our perspective on women’s place in the world from what we were hearing from the mainstream women’s movement. And we couldn’t have that conversation in spaces that were majority white women.”

Linda Burnham is the Research Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is the co-author of Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work. Burnham was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance, a national organization that was an early advocate for the rights of women of color. In 1990 she co-founded Women of Color Resource Center. She was its Executive Director for 18 years. Burnham led large delegations of women of color to the 1985 UN World Conference on Women in Nairobi, the 1995 UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, and the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

Burnham has published numerous articles on African-American women, African-American politics, and feminist theory in a wide range of periodicals and anthologies. In 2005 Burnham was nominated as one of 1000 Peace Women for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2008 she was awarded the Twink Frey Social Activist Fellowship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2009 she edited and contributed to the anthology, Changing the Race: Racial Politics and the Election of Barack Obama. Her recent article, “1% Feminism,” a response to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, was widely circulated.