ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Toni Morrison, a feminist thinker. When Morrison published "What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib" in August 1971, the New York Times identified her as an editor at Random House and the author of The Bluest Eye. Notably, Morrison's list includes landmark texts of twentieth-century feminist fiction, poetry, and theory by Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, June Jordan, and others. The richness of her language and the tenderness of her description inspirit her characters even as her narratives disclose the brutal specificity of Americans' twinned commitment to freedom and white supremacy. Among the many reservoirs from which she draws, Morrison notes that she is particularly indebted to the heritage of slave narratives. Even as she dissects the forms of entitlement and parochialism that define a woman's movement grounded in the experiences of "White Ladies" and their descendants, Morrison also relishes the possibility of generating something new and politically powerful.
