Words of Fire (7 page)

Black feminist writing proliferated during this period amid rancorous debate within the black community about the relevance of the contemporary white women's movement to black women. One of the most passionate defenders of feminist ideology to emerge, though she also delivered scathing critiques of white feminism, was bell hooks, whose pioneering monograph,
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
(1981) delineated the impact of sexism on the lives of black women; analyzed the devaluation of black womanhood, both historically and contemporaneously; and discussed the persistence of racism in the women's movement and the involvement of black women in struggles to achieve gender equality. The chapter on “Sexism and the Black Female Experience” advanced the new thesis that slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal
and
racist social order not only oppressed black men but also defeminized slave women. Over the next decade and a half, a substantial group of black feminist writers, among whom were Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Hull, Paula Giddings, and Barbara Christian, would redefine feminism as a broad political movement to end
all
forms of domination. In the words of hooks, “... feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few—and a commitment to reorganizing
U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires” (hooks, 1981, 194).

Reminiscent of the 1890s, writing, publishing, and organizing became a major preoccupation of black feminists during the 1980s, and heeding Cooper's words, black women were clearly speaking for themselves. Other groundbreaking texts were Barbara Christian's
Black Women Novelists
(1980); Angela Davis's
Women, Race, and Class
(1981); Filomina Chioma Steady's
The Black Woman Cross-Culturally
(1981); Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith's
All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies
(1982); Paula Gidding's
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Sex and Race in America
(1984); Alice Walker's
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
(1983); Barbara Smith's
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology
(1983); Audre Lorde's
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(1984); Deborah Gray White's
Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South
(1985); and Hazel Carby's
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist
(1987). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was founded in 1980 by Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith for the purpose of publishing mainly feminist women of color; its mission (see brochure) was also to provide a “political support network for feminists and lesbians of color as well.” The first explicitly black feminist periodical devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African decent in the United States and throughout the world was founded in 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia, and hosted by Spelman College's Women's Research and Resource Center, the first feminist institute on a historically black college campus. SAGE:
A Scholarly Journal on Black Women
would provide a major outlet for feminist perspectives on a variety of issues including mother-daughter relationships in the black community, health, science and technology, and the situation of women in rural Africa. During its founding conference in 1983, the National Black Women's Health Project, whose newsletter
Vital Signs
provides black feminist perspectives on health, attracted the largest group of black women ever to assemble on Spelman's campus.

Black feminist theory would come of age during the 1990s and move from the margins to the center of mainstream feminist discourse. Patricia Hill Collins's landmark
Black Feminist Thought
identified the fusion of activism and theory as its distinguishing characteristic, and analyzed its four core themes: the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppression in black women's personal, domestic, and work lives; the necessity of internalizing positive self-definitions and rejecting the denigrating, stereotypical, and controlling images (mammy, matriarch, welfare mother, whore) of others, both within and without the black community; and the need for active struggle to resist oppression and realize individual and
group empowerment (Collins, 23, 32, 83—84). The Collins text would further establish, along with Toni Cade's
The Black Woman
and bell hooks's—
Ain't I
a
Woman,
a continuous black feminist intellectual tradition going back to the publication of Cooper's
A Voice from the South
a hundred years earlier.

Despite their commitment to ending sexism, however, some black women continued to be alienated by the term “feminist.” Alice Walker's
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens
(1983) provided the alternative term “womanist” as a more culturally appropriate label for black feminists or feminists of color. “Womanist” recalled a black folk expression of mothers admonishing their daughters to refrain from “womanish” behavior. According to Walker, a “womanist” prefers women's culture, is committed to the survival of the entire group, is serious, “loves struggle,
loves
the folk, and loves herself” (Walker,
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens,
xi-xii). Inspired by Walker, scholars such as Cheryl Gilkes, Katie Cannon, Jacquelyn Grant, Delores Williams, Renita Weems, and Emily Townes, for example, self-identify as “womanist” theologians as a way of differentiating themselves from white feminist theologians.

President George Bush's 1991 nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and Professor Anita Hill's subsequent allegations of sexual harassment, which resulted in televised hearings for three days in October, sparked perhaps the most profound intraracial tensions around sexual politics that the modern African American community had ever experienced. Despite Hill's allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her while she worked under him at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), on October 16 the Senate confirmed, 52—48, Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing outgoing Thurgood Marshall.

A month later, a cogent statement opposing the racist and sexist treatment of Anita Hill appeared in the November 17, 1991, issue of the
New York Times
(A—53), “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” Over 1,600 black women reminded the nation of Thomas's persistent failure, despite his own racial history and professional opportunities, to respond to the urgency of civil rights for disadvantaged groups. Furthermore, the statement called attention to a long history of sexual abuse and stereotyping of black women as “immoral, insatiable, perverse.” The failure of Congress to take seriously Hill's sexual harassment charges was perceived as an attack on the collective character of black women (Chrisman and Allen, 292).

More than any other episode in recent memory, including the angry responses to
Black Macho, For Colored Girls,
and
The Color Purple,
the Thomas/Hill saga unmasked problematic gender attitudes within the black community and in some cases outright misogyny. Because Hill had violated
a deeply held cultural taboo—that racial dirty linen shouldn't be aired in public—she came to epitomize black female treachery in breaking the silence about objectionable black male behavior. For over a decade, black women had been labeled traitors among some segments of the community because of their advocacy of feminism, which was associated with white women. Despite the criticism, however, contemporary black feminists, like their nineteenth-century counterparts, mobilized for struggle with the hope that eradicating the twin evils of racism and sexism would become a battle cry within the entire community. In the aftermath of the Thomas/Hill hearings, black women witnessed rancorous public dialogue about their character, which sparked the formation of a new feminist organization, African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.

In January 1994, the largest gathering of black feminist scholars and activists took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during a national conference entitled “Black Women in the Academy: Defending Our Name, 1894-1994.” Ironically, nearly one hundred years after the historic gathering of clubwomen in Boston in 1895, over 2,000 mostly academic black women gathered again. Like black women in the 1890s, they found themselves under attack, much of which was generated by the Thomas/Hill hearings and the propaganda associated with welfare reform and “family values.” In addition, two prominent black academic women with liberal politics, Johnnetta Cole and Lani Guinier (both of whom were keynoters at MIT), had been viciously attacked by the Right; as a result, both of them were abandoned as appointees of the Clinton administration. Twenty-five years earlier, Angela Davis (the third keynoter) had been fired from her faculty job at the University of California, Los Angeles, by Governor Ronald Reagan because of her political views and Communist Party membership.

Among other things, the MIT conference demonstrated the persistence of black women intellectuals' commitment to feminist discourse and action, despite the absence of common ground on a number of issues. A resolution was drafted and sent to President Clinton which, first of all, acknowledged the “complexity of social categories such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.”
¹³
It called for a blue-ribbon panel on race relations in the United States; underscored the importance of research on black women that would promote the interests of the entire African American community; called for an examination of career advancement issues for women of color in higher education; and requested increased funding for community-based organizations serving poor black families and others in need, such as women in prison and people with AIDS. It also addressed international issues relating to Haiti, South Africa, Cuba, and Somalia. This document articulates the contours of contemporary black feminism and suggests a blueprint for the future.

As we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is apparent that the lives of many women around the world have been unaffected by centuries-old struggles for gender equality. In most places, women are poorer than men, in some places, daughters are still valued less than sons, and a global epidemic of violence against women remains unchecked.

It is also the case that the promise of feminism—that females can live better lives with a wider range of choices and resources—is a reality for some women three decades after the beginning of the “second wave” of the United States women's movement even though poverty, racism, and heterosexual privilege remain deeply entrenched.

More of us, women and men, must heed the challenge set before us by bell hooks in her first book on black feminism: “Only a few black women have rekindled the spirit of feminist struggle that stirred the hearts and minds of our nineteenth century sisters. We, black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as long as they see us reach our goat—no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid—they will take courage and follow”
(Ain't I
a
Woman,
196). The struggle continues.“
¹⁴

 

ENDNOTES

1
Blanche Glassman Hersh's
Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) excludes black women abolitionists from her discussion of feminist-abolitionists (her terminology) because of her erroneous assessment of their minimal involvement in the first wave of the women's movement, which she describes as largely white. Jean Yellin and John Van Horne's collection of essays,
The Abolitionist Sisterhood
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1994), corrects Hersh's assumptions by including extensive discussions of women of African descent in their category of antislavery feminist, “that small circle of black and white American women who, in the 1830s and 1840s, initially banded together to remedy the public evils of slavery and racism and who ultimately struggled for equal rights for women as well as slaves” (3). Yellin and Van Horne also complicate the analysis by indicating that this group was diverse and included more traditional women who were not feminist.

2
See Shirley J. Yee's
Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism
,
1828—1860
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992) for an excellent analysis of the emergence of black feminism in the early nineteenth century.

3
Gerda Lerner's
The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy
(New York: Oxford University Press 1993) documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women in the West to free their minds of patriarchal thinking, the roots of which can be found in institutionalized barriers to their intellectual development.
H
er brief discussion of African American women focuses on evangelists such as Sojourner Truth, whom she singles out as being “virtually alone among black women in the nineteenth century in staunchly combining the defense of her race with a defense of her sex” (106). Lerner also defines feminist consciousness as women's awareness that they belong to a subordinate group which has suffered because of societal constructs. As a result, they need to develop sisterly bonds with other women and work to change their subordinate status (274).

4
See Angela Davis's pioneering essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves,”
Black Scholar
3 (December 1971): 4—15, which
rewrites the history of slave resistance. Deborah Gray White's
Ar‘n't I
a
Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1985) also focuses on the black female slave experience.