ABSTRACT
The black women’s critique of history has not only involved us in coming to terms with ‘absences’; we have also been outraged by the ways in which it has made us visible, when it has chosen to see us. History has constructed our sexuality and our femininity as deviating from those qualities with which white women, as the prize objects of the Western world, have been endowed. We have also been denned in less than human terms.1 We cannot hope to constitute ourselves in all our absences, or to rectify the illconceived presences that invade herstory from history, but we do wish to bear witness to our own herstories. The connections between these and the herstories of white women will be made and remade in struggle. Black women have come from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean and we cannot do justice to all their herstories in a single chapter. Neither can we represent the voices of all black women in Britain, our herstories are too numerous and too varied. What we will do is to offer ways in which the ‘triple’ oppression of gender, race and class can be understood, in their specificity, and also as they determine the lives of black women.
