Saturdays are for the Boys… and the Brotherhood?

 Invisible Man warns of the dangers that stereotypes pose for marginalized groups through its portrayal of the main character's struggle with his identity. The novel starts off with the narrator retelling his youth, when he was living in the south and desperate for white validation. However, midway through the book, the narrator moves to New York, where he becomes a part of a progressive organization called the Brotherhood. There, he starts to question the systems of oppression put in place by white people and slowly becomes radicalized. The Brotherhood advocates for social change and preaches about racial equality but fails to properly advocate for the equality of women. The Brotherhood, as the name suggests, is a boys’ club.

The Brotherhood's misrepresentation of women's struggles, otherwise referred to as the “woman question,” begins in chapter 18, where the narrator is given an assignment to go downtown and speak on gender equality. The narrator, a man, has been sent downtown by the Brotherhood to be the face of the Women's movement. That sounds a little weird, doesn't it? The Brotherhood, an organization dedicated to advocating for equality, is sending a man to speak on the oppression of women with talking points that were made by (get this) another man. The Brotherhood makes no attempt to truly advocate for gender equality, which is seen through their exclusion of women in their movement. If the Brotherhood actually cared about the oppression of women, maybe they would have sent a woman downtown to speak on those issues. But they didn't, showing that they don't really care about the "woman question."

Not only does the Brotherhood make no effort to fully understand the struggles that women face, they also trivialize women's issues. The narrator is not chosen to speak on “the woman question” because he is the most qualified, but because the Brotherhood is disciplining him, “you are to have the choice of becoming inactive in Harlem, or accepting an assignment downtown. In the latter case you are to wind up your present assignment immediately” (Ellison 406). The Brotherhood saw that the narrator was becoming too much of a standout, so they assigned him to speak on feminist theory to take attention away from him. The Brotherhood does not care about gender equality and women's rights, because if they did they wouldn't have assigned men to speak on women's issues as a punishment. 

Though the Brotherhood claims to be egalitarian, they clearly don't care about women and gender equality. The Brotherhood makes it clear that they are a “Boys’ Club” through their poor and sexist handling of the “woman question.”