Words of Fire (2 page)

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 feminist 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.

 

 

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).

2
. Landmark texts in black feminist literary criticism are Barbara Smith's “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,”
Conditions: Two
(1977): 27—28, followed by Deborah McDowell's “New Directions for Black Feminist Criticism,”
Black American Literature Forum
(October 1980). See also: Barbara Christian,
Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers
(New York: Pargamon Press, 1985), which critic Michele Wallace names “the Bible in the field of black feminist criticism” in
Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory
(London: Verso, 1990) 184; Gloria Wade-Gayles,
No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women's Fiction
(New York: Pilgrim Press, 1984): Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds.,
Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Tradition
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Cheryl A. Wall, ed.,
Changing Our Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writings by Black Women
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Joanne M. Braxton,
Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition
, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Valerie Smith,
Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Gloria T. Hull,
Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Claudia Tate,
Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Karla Holloway,
Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in
Black Women's Literature
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). Feminist readings of black women writers have also been published by others, including Susan Willis,
Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Calvin Hernton,
The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers
(New York: Anchor 1987); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed.,
Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology
(New York: Penguin, 1990); Houston A. Baker, Jr.,
Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro
-
American Women's Writing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and most recently Madhu Dubey,
Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

3
Exceptions include E. Frances White, “Listening to the Voices of Black Feminism,”
Radical America
(1984): 7—25, which analyzes from a critical perspective the theoretical writing, excluding literary criticism, of contemporary black women since the 1970s on the themes of family, class, and sexuality; Wilson J. Moses, “Domestic Feminism, Conservatism, Sex Roles, and Black Women's Clubs, 1893—1896,”
Journal of Social and Behavioral Sciences
24 (Fall 1897): 166-177, in which he uses the phrase “genteel domestic feminism” to characterize the work of late-nineteenth-century black clubwomen, who, for the most part, accepted Victorian sexual values and the notion that women have the responsibility of upgrading the morality of home and family by toiling within the “women's sphere.” More typical is the approach taken by Linda Perkins in “Black Women and Racial ‘Uplift' Prior to Emancipation,”
The Black Woman Cross-Culturally,
ed. Filomina Steady (Cambridge: Scheckman Publishing, 1981), in which she employs a racefocused analysis in her discussion of the activist work of nineteenth-century black women.

4
The Washington and Jordan essays which appeared in the August 1974 issue of
Black World
signalled the importance of black women writers in the cultural history of African Americans and provided a catalyst for the development of black feminist criticism.

5
Ann duCille identifies such works as “the founding texts of contemporary black feminist studies,” in “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies,”
Signs
19: 3 (1994): 591-629.

6
Wall, I. She chronicles “the community of Black women writing” beginning with Toni Cade's
The Black Woman
(New York: Signet 1970) and marks a “few transformative moments in the development of black feminist criticism beginning with the work of critic Mary Helen Washington, which became more self-conscious with Barbara Smith's 1977 landmark essay, ”Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” She also locates Alice Walker's ”In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,“
Ms
. (May 1974), 64-70, in this tradition because it ”posits a theory of black female creativity and defines a tradition of black women's art” (5).

7
bell hooks, ”Out of the Academy and into the Streets,” in
Getting There: The Movement Toward Gender Equality
, ed. Diana Wells (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1994), 192-193. A longer version of this essay appeared as”Theory as Liberatory Practice,”
Yale Journal of Law and Feminism
4: 1, 1—12.

8
For a discussion of the history of the use of the French terms “feminisme” and “feministe” in the 1880s and eventually the English term “feminism” in the early 1900s, see Nancy Cott's
The Grounding of Modern Feminism
(New York: Yale University Press, 1987) in her chapter on “The Birth of Feminism.” Cott prefers not to use the term “feminism” in her discussions of the nineteenth-century women's rights or suffrage movement and alludes to a December 1909 article in the
American Suffragette
, “Suffragism Not Feminism,” in which some American women distanced themselves from what they perceived to be radical terminology. Cott indicates that it was around 1913 that American women embraced the term “feminism,” which marked a ”new phase in thinking about women's emancipation” (15).

9
hooks,
Getting There
, 193.

10
See Flora Davis,
Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement Since 1960
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991) though she, unfortunately, does not always identify women racially.

11
Three early anthologies of contemporary feminism-Joanne Cooke et al.'s
The New Women: An Anthology of Women's Liberation
(1970), Robin Morgan's
Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement
(1970), and Deborah Babcox and Madeline Belkin's
Liberation Now! Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement
(1970) pay some token attention to black women. They all include Frances Beale's ”Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female.” Morgan's book includes a section on women in the black liberation movement, and a long essay by Flo Kennedy, a civil rights lawyer, a member of The Feminists, and one of the founding members of the National Organization for Women (NOW). “Liberation Now!” contains a section on “caste, class, and race” and “sisters in revolution,” which includes an essay by an African woman.