Words of Fire (3 page)

 

 

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How I Wrote
Jubilee (New York: Feminist Press, 1990).

 

Sadie T. M. Alexander, “Negro Women in Our Economic Life,”
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(July 1930): 201-203

 

Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,”
The Black Woman,
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Shirley Chisholm, “Facing the Abortion Question,”
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(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 127-136.

 

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This Bridge Called My Back
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Hill Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,”
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^:
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Anna Julia Cooper,
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(Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1892).

 

Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves,”
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Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton, and Patricia Robinson, “A Historical and Critical Essay for Black Women,”
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ed. Mary L. Thompson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 316—324.

 

Evelynn Hammonds, “Missing Persons: African American Women, AIDS, and the History of Disease,”
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Lorraine Hansberry, “Simone de Beauvoir and
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An American Commentary,” unpublished manuscript. Lorraine Hansberry Archives, Croton-on-Hudson, New York.

 

Frances E. W. Harper, “Woman's Political Future,”
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Elizabeth Higginbotham, “Designing an Inclusive Curriculum: Bringing All Women into the Core,”
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Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,”
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June Jordan, “A New Politics of Sexuality,”
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Gloria Joseph, “Black Feminist Pedagogy and Schooling in Capitalist White America,”
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Florynce Kennedy, “A Comparative Study: Accentuating the Similarities of the Societal Position of Women and Negroes,”
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Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,”
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Linda La Rue, “The Black Movement and Women's Liberation,”
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Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,”
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Elise Johnson McDougald, “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation,”
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Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,”
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ed. Mary Lou Thompson (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 87–102.

 

Barbara Omolade, “Hearts of Darkness,”
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Barbara Smith, “Some Home Truths on the Contemporary Black Feminist Movement,”
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Pauline Terrelonge, “Feminist Consciousness and Black Women,”
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Sojourner Truth, “When Woman Gets Her Rights Man Will Be Right,”
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Mary Ann Weathers, “An Argument for Black Women's Liberation as a Revolutionary Force,”
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Ida Wells-Barnett, “Lynch Law in America,”
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E. Frances White, “Africa on My Mind: Gender, Counterdiscourse and African American Nationalism,”
Journal of Women's History
2 (Spring 1990)
^:
73-97.

This project has had both a long and short history. I have been reading and collecting, on a sustained basis, the writings of African American women since I joined the English Department at Spelman College in 1971.
Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature
(Doubleday, 1979) —co-edited by my deceased and beloved colleague, Roseann P. Bell, and friend Bettye J. Parker—was the first flowering of my passion for the wisdom, too often buried, of black women. My involvement with
SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women
and my many years of work on the doctoral dissertation
Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880–1920
(Carlson, 1990) confirmed what I had discovered during the lengthy evolution of my first publishing effort which was that black women have struggled against racism
and
sexism and many other “isms” during our involuntary sojourn in this country and that these courageous efforts have been ignored, misinterpreted, or maligned. I and many others name this work, among other descriptors, “feminist,” though I'm not bothered if others prefer different labels. Keeping this in mind, I would first of all like to thank all those sister-writers, especially the contributors to this anthology, who have validated our existence in the world.

Words of Fire
also has another, less complicated history. Several years ago a colleague and I started compiling feminist essays by black women going back to Maria Stewart which we planned to publish when we could get around to it, but we never did. Eventually Dawn Davis, editor at The New Press, contacted me about publishing with them and since I liked what they were doing, I agreed to reconceptualize and complete this first collection of readings on the evolution of feminist thought among African American women. I am grateful to my colleague for encouraging me to complete the project. I am also pleased that Dawn was persistent and allowed me the freedom to proceed. Her editorial judgment has been invaluable and I owe her a big thanks for helping me to fulfill one of my dreams. I would also like to acknowledge the cooperation of two friends.
Jewell Gresham Nemiroff granted me permission to include Lorraine Hansberry's unpublished essay on Simone de Beauvoir's
The Second
Sex. This gesture of friendship I am deeply grateful for. I would also like to thank Professor Margaret Wilkerson, Lorraine Hansberry's biographer, for agreeing to edit the unfinished essay on very short notice and for writing an eloquent introduction. I would like to thank as well Professor Ula Taylor for helping me to select from the numerous editorials which Amy Jacques Garvey wrote and for writing an introduction.

And finally I want to remember my own mother—the first feminist I ever knew. She encouraged me to live freely, be independent, sit on my own bottom, develop my intellect, treasure friendships with women, and recognize a good man when I saw one.

THE EVOLUTION OF FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN

—KESHO YVONNE SCOTT,
The Habit of Surviving

 

T
he struggle for black women's liberation that began to emerge in the mid-1960s is a continuation of both intellectual and activist traditions whose seeds were sown during slavery and flowered during the antislavery fervor of the 1830s. When a small group of free black “feminist-abolitionists” in the North surfaced during the early nineteenth century, among whom were Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Frances E. W. Harper, the history of African American feminism began.
¹
Their involvement in abolitionist and other reform movements as lecturers, writers, and journalists —traditionally male domains—met with resistance and violated the Victorian ethic of “true womanhood,” which stressed piety, chastity, submissiveness, and domesticity (Welter, 151).
^a

The argument that African American women confront both a “woman question and a race problem” (Cooper, 134) captures the essence of black feminist thought in the nineteenth century and would reverberate among intellectuals, journalists, activists, writers, educators, artists, and community leaders, both male and female, for generations. While feminist perspectives have been a persistent and important component of the African American literary and intellectual traditions for generations, scholars have focused primarily on its racial overtones.
²
This tendency to ignore long years of
political struggle aimed at eradicating the multiple oppressions that black women experience resulted in erroneous notions about the relevance of feminism to the black community during the second wave of the women's movement. Rewriting black history using gender as one category of analysis should render obsolete the notion that feminist thinking is alien to African American women or that they have been misguided imitators of white women. An analysis of the feminist activism of black women also suggests the necessity of reconceptualizing women's issues to include poverty, racism, imperialism, lynching, welfare, economic exploitation, sterilization abuse, decent housing, and a host of other concerns that generations of black women foregrounded.