Peggy McIntosh

Peggy McIntosh (born November 7, 1934) is an American feminist, anti-racism activist, scholar, speaker, and senior research scientist 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, hierarchies in education and society, and professional development of teachers.

She graduated from Radcliffe College of Harvard University in 1956 summa cum laude with a degree in English.

After spending a year at Bedford College, London, she became a teacher at the Brearley School, a girls' school in New York City, where she taught an "all-female curriculum."

McIntosh went on to receive her PhD at Harvard University, where she wrote her dissertation on Emily Dickinson's Poems about Pain.

She has held teaching positions at what was then Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in Washington, DC, the University of Durham in England and the University of Denver, where she was tenured and experimented with "radical teaching methods in English, American Studies, and Women's Studies."

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.

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.

McIntosh co-founded the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute with Nancy K. Hill in 1976.

McIntosh has worked at what is now the Wellesley Centers for Women since 1979.

More specifically, McIntosh served as the director of college programs at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, where she educated secondary school teachers on how their curriculum could change to be more inclusive of women's experiences.

McIntosh argued that all women, not just feminist leaders, deserve to have their history taught.

Informing the next generations about what women and other underdogs have been through gives a more holistic view of history.

Her recent book, On Privilege, Fraudulence, and Teaching As Learning: Selected Essays 1981-2019, is a collection of her essays published over her career.

McIntosh was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in New Jersey, where she attended public schools in Ridgewood and Summit, and spent one year at Kent Place School, before attending George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

In 1986, she founded the National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, which became the largest peer-led professional development project for educators in the United States, helping faculty to create curricula, teaching methods, and classroom climates that are multicultural, gender-fair, and inclusive of all students regardless of their backgrounds.

McIntosh and Emily Style co-directed the first 25 years of SEED.

McIntosh currently serves as a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women.

She directs the Gender, Race, and Inclusive Education Project, which provides workshops on privilege systems, feelings of fraudulence, and diversifying workplaces, curricula, and teaching methods.

McIntosh was featured in Mirrors of Privilege: Making Whiteness Visible, a documentary film produced by World Trust, revealing "what is often required [of people] to move through the stages of denial, defensiveness, guilt, fear, and shame into making a solid commitment to ending racial injustice."

As a speaker, McIntosh has presented or co-presented at over 1,500 private and public institutions and organizations, including 26 campuses located in Asia.

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".

In her 1988 essay, "White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women's Studies", McIntosh describes her understanding of "white privilege" as unearned advantage based on race, which can be observed both systemically and individually, like all unearned privileges in society (such as those related to class, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or ability).

After observing and investigating what she calls "unacknowledged male privilege" held unconsciously by men, McIntosh concluded that, since hierarchies in society are interlocking, she probably experienced a "white privilege" analogous to male privilege.

McIntosh used the metaphor of white privilege as "an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks".

In her original 1988 essay, McIntosh listed forty-six of her own everyday advantages, such as "I can go shopping most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed"; "I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race"; and "If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven't been singled out because of my race."

McIntosh has stated that in order to study systems of advantage and disadvantage as they impact individuals, "Whiteness is just one of the many variables that one can look at, starting with, for example, one's place in the birth order, or your body type, or your athletic abilities, or your relationship to written and spoken words, or your parents' places of origin, or your parents' relationship to education, to money, or to English, or what is projected onto your religious or ethnic background."

She believes that all people in the U.S. have a combination of systemic, unearned advantages and disadvantages.

She feels that it is not possible to do work against racism without doing work against white privilege, anymore than it is possible to do work against sexism without doing work against male privilege.

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.

In 1989, the original "White Privilege and Male Privilege" essay was edited down and entitled "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack".

Both the long and short pieces showcase the white privilege McIntosh experiences on a daily basis; through an extensive list of examples McIntosh illustrates that white privilege is like an intangible gift of unearned entitlement, unearned advantage, and unearned dominance.

Privilege gives white people easier access to political and societal benefits that people of color are denied.

This work has been included in many K-12 and higher education course materials, and has been cited as an influence for later social justice commentators.

McIntosh has written other articles on white privilege, including "White Privilege: Color and Crime"; "White Privilege, An Account to Spend"; and "White People Facing Race: Uncovering the Myths that Keep Racism in Place".

The organization disbanded in 2009.

The Denver Public Library has material from this group in their archives.