black women's studies

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Clark Atlanta University

Black Women's Studies: The Interface of Women's Studies and Black StudiesAuthor(s): Beverly Guy-SheftallReviewed work(s):Source: Phylon (1960-), Vol. 49, No. 1/2 (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 33-41Published by: Clark Atlanta UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3132615 .Accessed: 14/01/2013 04:39

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By BEVERLY GUY-SHEriALL

Black Women's Studies:The Interface of Women's Studies and

Black Studies

THE MOST SIGNIFICANT REFORMS n American higher educationover the past two decades have come as a result of the Black Studiesand Women's Studies1 movements. Less well known but alsoimportant has been the development within the past several years ofa new field of study - Black Women's Studies - which emerged in

part because of the failure of Black and Women's Studies to addressadequately the unique experiences of black women in America andthroughout the world. In the first publication on this newly emergingdiscipline called Black Women's Studies, the editors, all three of whomwere solid Black Studies scholars, attempt to define the new concept,trace its development, and provide a rationale for its existence:

Women's studies courses ... focused almost exclusively upon the lives ofwhite women. Black studies, which was much too often male-dominated,also ignored Black women.... Because of white women's racism andBlack men's sexism, there was no room in either area for a seriousconsideration of the lives of Black women. And even when they haveconsidered Black women, white women usually have not had the capacityto analyze racial politics and Black culture, and Black men have remainedblind or resistant to the implications of sexual politics in Black women'slives.'

It is important to understand the context out of which this firstinterdisciplinary anthology in Black Women's Studies emerged andwithout which it could not have been produced. The most noteworthydevelopments in Black Women's Studies (though this designation wasnot in use) came from a

relativelysmall but ever

expanding groupof

women scholars who had been teaching and doing research on blackwomen for at least twenty years. Many probably would haveconsidered themselves Black Studies scholars. The pioneering work ofeducator Anna J. Cooper, who wrote The Voice of the South By A BlackWoman of the South in 1892, has the distinction of being the first

'For a comprehensive xamination of women's tudies generally, see Marilyn J. Boxer, For and About Women: TheTheory and Practice of Women's Studies in the United States, Signs, 7 (Spring 1982): 660-96.

*Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds, Al the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, ButSome of Us Are Brave: Black Women's tudies (Old Westbury, New York, 1982), pp. xx-xxi. Subsequent referenceswill refer to this source as But Some of Us Are Brave.

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PHYLON

scholarly publication which now we would call Black Women's Studies.The publication of Toni Cade's The Black Woman in 1970, the firstanthology of writings by and about black women, was significantbecause of the value it attached to hearing the distinct voices of blackwomen themselves as they analyzed a number of contemporary ssues.Two years later, Gerda Lerner's documentary history Black Women nWhite America (1972) underscored the importance of treating theexperiences of Afro-American women as distinct from those of whitewomen and black men.3

Several other pioneers in the newly emerging field of BlackWomen's Studies were historians Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon

Harley, whose anthology (also a first) The Afro-American Woman:Struggles and Images (1978) contains original essays which treat blackwomen's experiences from a historical perspective. Terborg-Penn'sbibliographic essay Teaching the History of Black Women containsan exhaustive listing of the secondary sources available in blackwomen's history.4 Similarly, the work of La Frances Rodgers-Rose andFilomina Chioma Steady, both of whom edited the first social scienceanthologies on black women, has been critical as far as sociological andanthropological approaches to the study of black women are concerned.6

Attemptsto celebrate the existence of a distinct black female

literary tradition in America, which can be traced further back in time,also fall under the rubric of Black Women's Studies because theyacknowledge the politics of sex as well as the politics of race in thetexts of black women writers. This celebration has taken place in twophases. The first phase is characterized by efforts to document thatsuch a tradition exists. Frances Collier Durden's master's thesis,

Negro Women in Poetry from Phyllis Wheatley to Margaret Walker(Atlanta University, 1947), is probably the first work that falls intothis category. One of the earliest doctoral dissertations to analyze theblack female literary tradition (which is different from examinationsof images of black women in literature) is Beatrice Horn Royster's TheIronic Vision of Four Black Women Novelists: A Study of the Novels of

'Recent publications n black women's history are Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women n theNineteenth Century New York, 1984); Paula Giddings, When and Where Enter: The Impact of Black Women n Raceand Sex in America New York, 1984); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, andthe Family rom Slavery o the Present New York, 1986); Bettina Aptheker, Woman's egacy: Esays on Rae, Sex, andClam n American History Amherst, 1982); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Clam (New York, 1981); and DeborahGray White, Arn't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1986).

'The History Teacher, 13 (February 1980): 246-50.'See La Frances Roders-Rose, ed., The Black Woman Beverly Hills, California, 1980) and Filomina C. Steady, ed.,

The Black Woman Cross-Culturaly Cambridge, Mass., 1981).

Vol. XTIX, Nos. 1, 2, 1992

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WOMEN'S TUDIES AND BLACK TUDIES

Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry(Emory University, 1975).

SharynSkeeter's Black Women Writers:

Levels of Identity (Essence, May 1973) is better known and reacheda broader audience.

The second phase was ushered in by the publication of Mary HelenWashington's scholarly article Black Women Image Makers (BlackWorld, August 1974). Moving beyond the descriptive approach ofSkeeter, she argued that black women writers are a distinct group notonly because of their long history but because unique themes recur intheir works. The introduction to her pioneering anthology Black-EyedSusans: Classic Stories By and About Black Women (1975) contains a

more detailed analysis of these major themes. Alice Walker's essay InSearch of Our Mother's Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women inthe South (Ms., May 1974) is perhaps the most eloquent and poignantaccount of the black woman artist ever written. It should bementioned also that Walker designed the first course on black womenwriters, which she taught in 1977 at Wellesley College. Anotherpublication in the second phase was Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions ofBlack Women n Literature, edited by Roseann Bell, Bettye Parker, andBeverly Guy-Sheftall (1979), which was credited with being the first

book-length critical work devoted to a 'minority' literature.The second phase is distinguished also by the emergence of blackfeminist literary criticism, notably Barbara Smith's and DeborahMcDowell's groundbreaking work7 and Barbara Christians's BlackWomen Novelists: The Development of a Tradition 1892-1976 (1981),the first full-length study of the novels of black women. Thepublication of Gloria Wade-Gayle's No Crystal Stair, Visions of Raceand Sex in Black Women's Fiction (New York, 1984) links her to asmall but productive body of black feminist critics who analyze theworks of Black female writers from a feminist or political perspective.Wade-Gayle's outstanding contribution to Black Women's Studies isthat she provides a coherent conceptual framework for understandingwhat it has meant to be black and female as this experience isportrayed in the literature of black women of the mid-twentiethcentury. Her use of two central metaphors - the narrow space andthe dark enclosure - to illuminate the double burden of race and sex,which is unique to black women, is stunningly perceptive. Shedescribes three circles, asserting boldly:

*Cheri Register, Literary Criticism, igns, 6 (Winter 1980): 270.'See Barbara Smith, 'Toward A Black Feminist Criticism, Conditions: Two (October 1977): 27-28 and Deborah

McDowell, New Directions or Black Feminist Criticism, lack American Literature Forum, 14 (October 1980): 153.*McDowell, NewDirections, . 156.

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WOMEN'S STUDIES AND BLACK STUDIES

Until the emergence of Black Women's Studies, most of the researchon black women, excluding the work on black women writers, focusedon their roles within the black family, especially the role of the blackmatriarch, a persistent theme in Black Studies scholarship.'1 A secondarea of research has focused on the public lives of notable black womensuch as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Mary Church Terrell, andMary McLeod Bethune. Part of the motivation for this great blackwomen in history approach which characterizes much of the BlackStudies work on black women is simply to record the fact that blackwomen were indeed present in history. In her analysis of researchpriorities in Black Women's Studies, Patricia Bell Scott has arguedthat there should be more examinations of the black and femaleexperience that are sensitive to the ways in which racism and sexismbear upon black women. While such approaches to the study ofblack women are appropriate, a major problem that continues toconfront the Black Women's Studies scholar, whose primary challengeremains exploring the intersection of race, gender, and class, is thedifficulty of arriving at theoretical frameworks which will enable oneto understand the complexity and diversity of the black femaleexperience throughout the world.

Accordingto Gerda

Lerner,the

major conceptualframework for

studying American women has been provided by feminist scholars who,using the women as minority group model (the minority group modelhas been frequently used by Black Studies Scholars as well),12 seewomen mainly in terms of their oppression and their struggles toovercome it. The shortcomings of this widely used minority groupmodel to explain the history of American women have been analyzedby historian William Chafe, who has written both black and women'shistory, and others. His major points concerning the problematicnature of the analogy between race and sex are that the collectiveoppression of blacks, especially the physical abuse they have suffered,is substantially greater than that of white women; that there isphysical distance between whites and blacks, whereas white womenlive in close contact with white men, which gives them greater accessto the sources of power than is the case with black women; and that

'See W.E.B. DuBois' The Negro American Family (Atlanta, 1908); E. Franklin Frazier's The Negro Family in theUnited States (Chicago, 1939); and Daniel Moynihan's The Negro Family: A Case for National Action (Washington,D.C., 1966) for a discussion of the black matriarch

heory.Critics of this

theorynclude Robert

Staples,The

Mythof theBlack Matriarchy, heBlac Scholar, 1 (January/February 970): 8-16, and Andrew Billingley, Black Familiesin White America Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969).

uBut Some Of Us Are Brave, p. 89.2The women as minority group analogy was developed n 1951 by Helen Hacker. See her 'Women as a Minority

Group, ocial Forces, 30 (October 1951): 60-9.

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WOMEN'S STUDIES AND BLACK STUDIES

by black women in ways that are impossible for other segments of thepopulation. They are also in a position, as Black Studies scholarsalways have been, to challenge accepted scholarship. The study ofblack women, for example, renders invalid many of the generalizationswhich abound in the historiography of American women and areconsidered universal. An example from the introduction to Root ofBitterness, a documentary social history of American women, willillustrate this point. Here Nancy Cott states that most of the late-nineteenth-century women who initiated significant social welfareactivities in cities did their work while unmarried or widowed, and onethinks immediately of Jane Addams and nods in agreement. Cott then

speculates that these educated women were unable to reconcile thedemands of the nuclear family with their newly defined roles so theyevaded the problem by remaining single. When one recalls the historyof black women during this same period (as one familiar with BlackStudies would), one thinks of Lugenia Burns Hope, Ida Wells Barnett,and other middle-class, educated married black women who performedpioneering social welfare activities when racial uplift preoccupied theblack elite. A critical question for the Black Women's Studies scholar(which might not be raised by the conventional Black Studies scholar)

is why these black women were better able to juggle the roles of wife,mother, and career than their white female counterparts. Forexample, Ida Wells Barnett, determined not to give up her public life,carried her baby Charles (and nurse) along with her to women'sconventions and political campaigns. He became such a fixture at theNational Association of Colored Women's meetings that on one occasionhe was elected Baby of the Association. In order to explain why blackwomen's lives diverged from white women's lives in this respect, itwould be helpful to consider the special historical experiences ofblacks, the particulars of the women's lives, and the sociology of sexroles.

Another generalization in women's history is that women can becompared to other minority groups because their physicalcharacteristics make them easily identifiable and therefore they can be

singled out from the others in the society in which they live fordifferential and unequal treatment. '5 The case of Lucy Parsonsrenders invalid even this seemingly indisputable fact. Lucy is therelatively obscure invisible black woman who was married to AlbertParsons, one of the anarchists accused of the Haymarket bombing in

Dorothy Sterling, Black Foremothers Westbury, N.Y., 1979), pp. 97-8.Louis Wirth, The Problems of Minority Groups, n Man in the World Crisis, ed., Ralph Linton New York, 1945),

quoted by William Chafe, Women nd Equality, p. 4.

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WOMEN'S TUDIES AND BLACK TUDIES 41

reflect more accurately he diversity and complexity f experiences ofblacks and women

throughouthe world. But Some of Us Are Brave

provided a needed shot in the arm for the expansion of Black Women'sStudies on college campuses throughout the nation. The birth of Sage:A Scholarly Journal on Black Women in 1984, which is edited byPatricia Bell Scott, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Jacqueline Jones Royster,and Janet Sims Wood, and is housed at Spelman College's Women'sResearch and Resource Center, is a concrete manifestation of the

coming of age of Black Women's Studies. Numerous periodicals andjournals are continuing to produce special issues on black women.Approximately fifty dissertations on black women with a variety of

subjects are listed with University Microfilms since 1970 comparedwith less than ten prior to that time. The ultimate challenge, however,is for Women's Studies and Black Studies scholars to recognize thatblack women's history is, in fact, women's history and black history.Such a perspective would render Black Women's Studies unnecessaryor at the very least redundant over the long run.
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