Words of Fire

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

—GERTRUDE BUSTILL MOSSELL, 1894

 

T
he 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 tradition
¹
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 terminology 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.