Words of Fire by Beverly Guy-Sheftall Read Free Book Online Page B

black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as long as they see us reach our goat—no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid—they will take courage and follow” (Ain’t I a Woman, 196). The struggle continues.“ 14
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    ENDNOTES
    1 Blanche Glassman Hersh’s Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978) excludes black women abolitionists from her discussion of feminist-abolitionists (her terminology) because of her erroneous assessment of their minimal involvement in the first wave of the women’s movement, which she describes as largely white. Jean Yellin and John Van Horne’s collection of essays, The Abolitionist Sisterhood (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1994), corrects Hersh’s assumptions by including extensive discussions of women of African descent in their category of antislavery feminist, “that small circle of black and white American women who, in the 1830s and 1840s, initially banded together to remedy the public evils of slavery and racism and who ultimately struggled for equal rights for women as well as slaves” (3). Yellin and Van Horne also complicate the analysis by indicating that this group was diverse and included more traditional women who were not feminist.
    2 See Shirley J. Yee’s Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism , 1828—1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992) for an excellent analysis of the emergence of black feminism in the early nineteenth century.
    3 Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy (New York: Oxford University Press 1993) documents the twelve-hundred-year struggle of women in the West to free their minds of patriarchal thinking, the roots of which can be found in institutionalized barriers to their intellectual development. H er brief discussion of African American women focuses on evangelists such as Sojourner Truth, whom she singles out as being “virtually alone among black women in the nineteenth century in staunchly combining the defense of her race with a defense of her sex” (106). Lerner also defines feminist consciousness as women’s awareness that they belong to a subordinate group which has suffered because of societal constructs. As a result, they need to develop sisterly bonds with other women and work to change their subordinate status (274).
    4 See Angela Davis’s pioneering essay, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black Scholar 3 (December 1971): 4—15, which
rewrites the history of slave resistance. Deborah Gray White’s Ar‘n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985) also focuses on the black female slave experience.
    5 Frances Dana Gage, a white abolitionist who chaired the historic meeting in Akron, is responsible for the details of this gathering, which focus on Truth’s presence and what she did and said. The speech, which Gage is reputed to have recorded, appears in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage, 6 vols. (Rochester and New York, 1889-1992), 2: 193. See Nell Irvin Painter’s “Difference, Slavery, and Memory: Sojourner Truth in Feminist Abolitionism,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood, eds. Yellin and Van Horne, and her “Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory,” in Gender and History 2 (Spring 1990): 3—16, which raise doubts about Gage’s version of the Sojourner Truth saga in Akron, Ohio.
    6 See Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s award-winning book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) for a discussion of the feminist theology of black Baptist women, Nannie Burroughs’s struggles against racism and sexism, and