Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Selections
Acknowledgments
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - Beginnings: In Defense of Our Race and Sex, 1831-1900
Maria Miller Stewart (1803-1879)
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883)
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)
Anna Julia Cooper (1859?-1964)
Julia A. J. Footle (1823—1900)
Gertrude Bustill Mossell (1855—1948)
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)
Ida Wells-Barnett (1862—1931)
CHAPTER TWO - Triumph and Tribulation: Defining Black Womanhood, 1920-1957
Elise Johnson McDougald
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875-1935)
Amy Jacques Garvey (1896—1973) Ula Taylor
Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1898-1989)
Florynce “Flo” Kennedy (1916—)
Claudia Jones (1915—1965)
Lorraine Hansberry (1930—1965)
CHAPTER THREE - Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation: Racial/Sexual Politics in ...
Frances Beale
Mary Ann Weathers
Linda La Rue
Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson
Pauli Murray (1910—1985)
Angela Davis (1944—)
Michele Wallace (1952—)
CHAPTER FOUR - Beyond the Margins: Black Women Claiming Feminism
The Combahee River Collective
Cheryl Clarke
Barbara Smith
bell hooks (1952- )
Audre Lorde (1934—1992)
Deborah K. King
Jacquelyn Grant
Patricia Hill Collins
CHAPTER FIVE - The Body Politic: Sexuality, Violence, and Reproduction
Barbara Omolade
Darlene Clark Hine (1947—)
Shirley Chisholm (1924—)
Beth E. Richie
June Jordan (1936—)
Paula Giddings (1947- )
Pearl Cleage
Evelynn Hammonds
CHAPTER SIX - Reading the Academy
Margaret Walker Alexander (1915–)
Gloria Joseph
Elizabeth Higginbotham
CHAPTER SEVEN - Discourses of Resistance: Interrogating Mainstream Feminism and ...
Pauline Terrelonge
E. Frances White
Barbara Ransby and Tracye Matthews
Alice Walker (1944—)
Epilogue
Selected
Index
Copyright Page
FOR...
Maria Stewart, Anna Julia Cooper, Nannie Burroughs, Pauli Murray,
and Audre Lorde—who showed us the way
the sister-writers in Theorizing Black Feminisms
the SAGE editorial group
all the students at Spelman
my mother, Ernestine—who stays in my heart
all my sister-friends, especially Paula
and most especially for my sister Francine who helps me see rainbows
Preface
The intellectual history of a people or nation constitutes to a great degree the very heart of its life. To find this history, we search the fountainhead of its language, its customs, its religion, and its politics expressed by tongue or pen, its folklore, and its songs.
—GERTRUDE BUSTILL MOSSELL, 1894
The history of American feminism has been primarily a narrative about the heroic deeds of white women. In Miriam Schneir’s Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (1972), which focuses on “first-wave” feminism, Sojourner Truth is the only black woman from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s who helped to create the conditions that made “second-wave” or modern feminism possible. The chapter on “Men as Feminists” did not include Frederick Douglass (he is included in the chapter on “An American Woman’s Movement”) and William E. B. Du Bois, two of the most outspoken women’s rights advocates in the nineteenth century. In Schneir’s subsequent volume, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present (1994), black women are more visible, but the old framework remains unchallenged. In her brief description of the circumstances that precipitated the first organized women’s movement in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, black women are absent, slavery is not mentioned, and generalizations about American womanhood clearly refer only to a particular class of white women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are invoked, predictably, as the quintessential feminists.
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought documents the presence of a continuous feminist intellectual tradition in the nonfictional prose of African American women going back to the early nineteenth century when abolition and suffrage were urgent political issues. It is a rewriting of the familiar narrative of American feminism and a retelling of African American intellectual history. It is deliberately incomplete and includes mostly previously published essays.
Because black women scholars (primarily) have documented over the past two decades the existence of a black women’s literary tradition1 and generated a substantial body of work in the area of black feminist literary studies,2 many discussions of black feminism focus narrowly on the imaginative literature of black women, particularly fiction.3 For several reasons I have omitted from this collection fiction, poetry, and literary criticism, though black feminist perspectives certainly inform much of this work, particularly since the 1960s. The literature of contemporary black women is more accessible because of a tremendous outpouring of publications heralding what some scholars call a black women’s literary renaissance. As literary critic Cheryl Wall indicates, “over the past two decades, Afro-American women have written themselves into the national consciousness. Their work is widely read, frequently taught, and increasingly the object of critical inquiry” (Wall, I). Literary critic Deborah McDowell’s edited Black Women Writers series (Beacon Press), the thirty-volume series, The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (1988), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as well as other reclamation projects, also make available a broad range of writing by black women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
I have also not included pioneering critical essays in black feminist literary studies such as Mary Helen Washington’s “Black Women Image Makers: Their Fiction Becomes Our Reality,” June Jordan’s “On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston: Notes Towards a Balancing of Love and Hate,”4 Barbara Smith’s “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Deborah McDowell’s “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,” Alice Walker’s “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Barbara Christian’s “A Race for Theory,” and many more whose focus is primarily the creative expression of African American women.5
I use the term “feminist” to capture the emancipatory vision and acts of resistance among a diverse group of African American women who attempt in their writings to articulate their understanding of the complex nature of black womanhood, the interlocking nature of the oppressions black women suffer, and the necessity of sustained struggle in their quest for self-definition, the liberation of black people, and gender equality. Some also express solidarity with other women and people of color engaged in local and global struggles for liberation. Cheryl Wall names these impulses “critical self-consciousness about our positionality, defined as it is by race, gender, class, and ideology.”6 bell hooks describes this kind of “theorizing” on the part of black women, including herself, coming from our “lived” experience of critical thinking, reflection, and analysis. Selections were chosen not because the authors self-identify as feminists or are being defined by me as feminists; some may even reject this terminol
ogy altogether. I concur with bell hooks who reminds us that “we can act [or write] in feminist resistance without ever using the word ‘feminism’.”7 The women included here are also not a monolithic band with similar world views or the same conceptions of “feminism.”8 They have different family configurations and class backgrounds, widely divergent political views, and diverse disciplinary perspectives. Sometimes their feminist discourse is autobiographical, controversial, visionary, understated and subtle, but more often it is hardhitting and strident. Some authors are passionate and angry, others more cautious and indirect. There are familiar figures—Sojourner Truth, Shirley Chisholm, Angela Davis—and not so familiar ones—Julia Foote, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Mary Ann Weathers. They have multiple identities, several voices, and different battles to engage. They are academics, activists, artists, community organizers, mothers. They are race women, socialists, communists, Christians, atheists, lesbian and straight, traditional and radical. They share a collective history of oppression and a commitment to improving the lives of black women, especially, and the world in which we live.
The anthology has both a chronological and thematic organization with headnotes preceding each selection which include commentary about the author and the significance of the text. A broad range of issues is discussed —the moral integrity of black women, lynching, poverty, institutionalized racism and sexism, the racism of white women, the sexism of black men, education, black families, male/female relationships, economics, reproductive freedom, sexual and family violence, sexuality, heterosexism, the Civil Rights movement, black nationalism, women’s liberation struggles nationally and internationally, and female genital mutilation.
The first four chapters trace the development of black feminist thought from Maria Stewart, writing in the 1830s, through the emergence of black feminist theorizing in the 1970s and 1980s, and the final three chapters focus on a particular theme. Chapter I, “Beginnings: In Defense of Our Race and Sex, 1831-1900,” includes the writings of a number of nineteenth-century “race women” who are also early feminists, though they would not have used this terminology. These foremothers include a number of women whose voices are not here-Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Fannie Barrier Williams, Mary Shadd Cary, and Sarah Remond, to name a few. They all reveal a sensitivity to race and gender issues, though they tend not to question their culturally prescribed roles as wives and mothers. They demand equal access to education, the removal of barriers which would prohibit their work in the public domain, and a greater voice in the political arena. They also acknowledge the extraordinary accomplishments of black women in a variety of professions, despite restrictive cultural attitudes within and without the black community.
Chapter 2, “Triumph and Tribulation: Defining Black Womanhood, 1920—1957,” covers the first half of the twentieth century, a time during which the patriarchal gender conventions that characterized the post-Reconstruction or Progressive era became more entrenched. These readings attempt to define the complex nature of the black female experience; name in very explicit terms the nature of the oppression which black women continued to experience; and articulate strategies of resistance which made possible the emergence of a “new Negro woman” less hemmed in by outmoded gender definitions and unbridled racism. This section also illustrates bell hooks’s assertion that “the production of feminist theory is complex, that it is less the individual practice than we often think, and usually emerges from engagement with collective sources.”9 We see the influence of the Stewart-Truth generation and the impact of feminist struggles throughout the world on the thinking, for example, of Amy Jacques Garvey and Lorraine Hansberry.
Chapter 3, “Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation: Racial/Sexual Politics in the Angry Decades,” documents the emergence of what we would now call contemporary black feminism, which is traceable in large part to the frustrations of black women in the male-dominant Civil Rights and black nationalist movements of the sixties. We revisit the dilemmas that black women also faced during the nineteenth century with respect to alliances with white women more committed to the eradication of sexism than they were to ending racism. I hasten to add, however, that while the “second-wave” women’s movement was dominated by white women, black women were significant participants, though largely unacknowledged, in the development of the modern women’s movement, despite their experience of racism within mainstream feminist organizations.10
Chapter 4, “Beyond the Margins: Black Women Claiming Feminism,” includes a small sampling of an enormous body of explicitly feminist discourse which was generated during the 1980s and demonstrates African American women’s continuing commitment to the ideology of feminism broadly defined, as well as their critical role in the development of feminist theory, though they would be marginalized in this history as well.11
The remaining three chapters illuminate the contours of contemporary black feminism by focusing on three major themes—the body politic, the academy, and responses to black nationalism and mainstream white feminism. Chapter 5, “The Body Politic: On Sexuality, Violence, and Reproduction,” probes a number of issues around which there has historically been considerable silence within the African American community for a number of reasons, not the least of which has been the desire to avoid airing “dirty linen” in a white supremacist society committed to perpetuating damaging racial stereotypes and disempowering entire groups.
Chapter 6, “Reading the Academy,” underscores the historical connections African American women have made between learning and liberation; acknowledges their erasure within educational institutions; analyzes the development and impact of a new field of study called black women’s studies or black feminist studies; and probes the plight of the black woman intellectual and the recent appropriation of African American women as literary and historical subjects by white feminists and black male scholars.
Chapter 7, “Discourses of Resistance: Interrogating Mainstream Feminism and Black Nationalism,” foregrounds writings that explicitly challenge the hegemonic discourses of white, Western feminism because of its insensitivity to race and class, and of black nationalism, which has often been gender-blind, homophobic, and patriarchal in its worldview. Johnnetta Cole, president of Spelman College and author of All American Women (a widely used anthology in women’s studies classes) and Conversations: Straight Talk with America’s Sister President, has written a thoughtful epilogue about the importance of black women’s maintaining connections to their feminist herstories.
Words of Fire is a highly selective collection of feminist essays by African American women some of which have appeared in a variety of places and are often difficult to retrieve, though some have been frequently anthologized. In most cases, the entire text has been reprinted, and in a few cases the essay has been shortened. In order to keep the anthology to a reasonable size, it was necessary to exclude important essays such as Mae King’s “Oppression and Power: The Unique Status of the Black Woman in the American Political System,” Bonnie Thornton Dill’s “Race, Class and Gender: Prospects for an All-Inclusive Sisterhood,” Hortense Spillers’s “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” Joyce A. Joyce’s “Black Woman Scholar, Critic, and Teacher: The Inextricable Relationship Among Race, Sex, and Class,” Paulette Caldwell’s “A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender,” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” and Ann du Cille’s “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies,” to name only a few. In addition to excluding literary and cultural criticism, I also omitted highly specialized essays in academic disciplines/interdisciplines such as art history, film studies, classics, linguistics, jurisprudence, anthropology, and theology. I regret the absence, with one exception, of material on health and the sciences, though Evelyn White’s The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves (1990) and Wings of Gauze: Women of Color and the Experience of Health and Illness (1993), provide excellent black femini
st perspectives on a number of issues.
While this anthology is incomplete, it should achieve a number of objectives. It contributes to the retelling of American, African American, women’s, and world history, and is instructive for black women and those wanting to understand the evolution of black feminist thought in the United States. In particular, it will be useful for black studies and women’s studies curricula, especially in staple courses such as feminist theory and black women writers. It also helps to dismantle stereotypes about peoples of African descent, women, and particularly black women, where their intellects and sexualities are concerned. Moreover, it provides greater clarity about the impact and interface of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism on the lives of African American women, around whom swirl so many mythologies. These daring women also enable all of us to imagine a world in which race, gender, and class hierarchies are no longer viable. Finally, Words of Fire attests to the maturity of black feminist studies and its importance in the transformation of the American academy.
ENDNOTES
1 A small group of mainly black feminist scholars have been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American literary tradition by establishing the importance of black women’s literature. See Helen Washington’s “BlackWomen Image Makers,” in Black Eyed Susans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor 1971) and Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860—1960 (New York: Doubleday, 1988); Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892—1976 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 198o); Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Deborah E. McDowell, “The Changing Same”: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Early anthologies of black women’s literature were also important: Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, eds., Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1979); Pat Crutchfield Exum, ed., Keeping the Faith (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1974); Barbara Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983); Mari Evans, The Black Woman Writer, 1950—1989 (New York: Doubleday, 1984); Juliette Bowles, ed., Frances, Zora and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1979).
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