ABSTRACT
IN THE FIRST DECADES of the twentieth century Maggie Lena Walker repeatedly challenged her contemporaries to “make history as Negro women.” Yet she and her colleagues in the Independent Order of Saint Luke, like most Black and other women of color, have been virtually invisible in women’s history and women’s studies. Although recent books and articles have begun to redress this,1 the years of exclusion have had an impact more significant than just the invisibility of Black women, for the exclusion of Black women has meant that the concepts, perspectives, methods, and pedagogies of women’s history and women’s studies have been developed without consideration of the experiences of Black women. As a result many of the recent explorations in Black women’s history have attempted to place Black women inside feminist perspectives, which, by design, have omitted their experiences. Nowhere is this exclusion more apparent than in the process of defining women’s issues and women’s struggle. Because they have been created outside the experiences of Black women, the definitions used in women’s history and women’s studies assume the separability of women’s struggle and race struggle. Such arguments recognize the possibility that Black women may have both women’s concerns and race concerns, but they insist upon delimiting each. They allow, belatedly, Black women to make history as women or as Negroes but not as “Negro women.” What they fail to consider is that women’s issues may be race issues, and race issues may be women’s issues.2
