ABSTRACT

T he black feminist movement, which began to emerge in the mid-1960s, is a continuation of both an intellectual and activist tradition that began more than a century and a half ago. The argument that African-American women confronted both a “woman question and a race problem” captured the essence of black feminist thought at the turn of the century and would reverberate among intellectuals, academics, activists, writers, educators, and community leaders, both male and female, for generations. While feminist perspectives have in fact been a persistent and important component of the African-American literary and intellectual tradition since slavery, scholars until fairly recently have focused primarily on the racial perspectives of blacks. This tendency to ignore long years of political struggle aimed at eradicating the multiple oppressions black women experience resulted in erroneous notions about the relevance of feminism to the black community during the second wave of the women’s movement. Revisioning black history with a gender analysis, however, should render obsolete the notion that feminist thinking is alien to African Americans or that they have been misguided imitators of white women.