From former slaves, housewives and college professors to Nobel Award-, Pulitzer Prize- and Olympic Gold-winners, this compelling anthology offers vivid and inspiring portraits of fifty black women who made monumental contributions to the world, including Sojourner Truth, Hattie McDaniel, Ella Fitzgerald, Oprah Winfrey, Tina Turner and many more women - both famous and little-known.
The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States. An empowering and intersectional history that centers the stories of African American women across 400+ years, showing how they are—and have always been—instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women’s stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women’s unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women’s History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women’s lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women’s history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
"After 20 years of research and loving dedication, author Jessie Carney Smith presents this tribute to 100 African-American women of achievement. Their strength, courage, determination, and style have made a tremendous impact in a variety of fields - from aeronautics to civil rights to the arts and entertainment. Many of these women will be familiar to you, but many more are unsung heroes whose stories you will discover for the first time. As Dr. Smith told the Chicago Tribune, "I want people to feel that these are women they can look up to, be inspired by, or remember in some small way.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
`The Black Woman...has a great deal of relevance to the black woman in Britain today and its message is clear. We must continue to use our heritage of strength and determination...to establish our right to equal citizenship...' -- New Community, Spring-Summer 1981 `...a serious attempt to inform by presenting historical, research, and experiential accounts of Black women by Black women. The book should be relevent on both an informative and sensitizing basis for graduate level social science students.' -- Sex Roles, Vol 7 No 12, 1981 `...an impressive group of papers regarding the experiences of African American women, past and present. It is a collection that is original, thought provo
In Sisters of the Yam, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.
At the greatest moments and in the cruelest times, black women have been a crucial part of America's history. Now, the inspiring history of black women in America is explored in vivid detail by two leaders in the fields of African American and women's history. A Shining Thread of Hope chronicles the lives of black women from indentured servitude in the early American colonies to the cruelty of antebellum plantations, from the reign of lynch law in the Jim Crow South to the triumphs of the Civil Rights era, and it illustrates how the story of black women in America is as much a tale of courage and hope as it is a history of struggle. On both an individual and a collective level, A Shining Thread of Hope reveals the strength and spirit of black women and brings their stories from the fringes of American history to a central position in our understanding of the forces and events that have shaped this country.
From a dazzling array of well-known African American women, short fiction, poems, and personal essays that describe with warmth and humor their experiences as mothers and as daughters. A sparkling anthology devoted to exploring the lives of African American mothers, Rise Up Singing presents the stories and reflections of such beloved and respected artists, journalists, and authors as Alice Walker, Faith Ringgold, Marita Golden, Martha Southgate, Tananarive Due, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Deborah Roberts, Rita Dove, and others. It features original and previously published writings, organized by editor Cecelie Berry by themes—mothering, work, family, children, community, and love—that illuminate the multiple roles of black mothers at home, in the neighborhood, and in the world as a whole. Rise Up Singing brings together the perspectives of women of different ages, backgrounds, and accomplishments. What shines through in their writings are the hopes shared by all mothers. As Marian Wright Edelman writes in the Foreword: “The mothers writing in this anthology speak in a range of voices. They are joyful, stressed, grateful, ambivalent, determined, disappointed, and, in bad ways and good, overwhelmed. But over and over again . . . we see mothers struggling with the push: striving to give their children their best and to make sure the world gives their children its best, hard as that fight may be.”
This timely and compelling ethnography examines the impact of welfare reform on women seeking to escape domestic violence. Dána-Ain Davis profiles twenty-two women, thirteen of whom are Black, living in a battered women's shelter in a small city in upstate New York. She explores the contradictions between welfare reform's supposed success in moving women off of public assistance and toward economic self-sufficiency and the consequences welfare reform policy has presented for Black women fleeing domestic violence. Focusing on the intersection of poverty, violence, and race, she demonstrates the differential treatment that Black and White women face in their entanglements with the welfare bureaucracy by linking those entanglements to the larger political economy of a small city, neoliberal social policies, and racialized ideas about Black women as workers and mothers.
It's time for a REDEFINITION among black women in America. In its 2011 hardcover release, Black Woman Redefined was a top-selling book and took home a 2011 Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award from the African American Literary Awards. Author Sophia A. Nelson won the 2012 Champions of Diversity Award, given each year by diversity business executives in Fortune 100 companies. Black Woman Redefined was inspired in part by what Nelson calls “open season on accomplished black women": from Don Imus's name-calling of black female basketball players in 2007 and a 2009 Yale University study titled “Marriage Eludes High-Achieving Black Women," to the more recent revelation that First Lady Michelle Obama is concerned about being painted as an “angry, black woman." In Black Woman Redefined, Nelson sets out to change this cultural perception, taking readers on a no-holds-barred journey into the hearts and minds of accomplished black women to reveal truths, tribulations, and insights like never before. This groundbreaking book provides black women of a new generation with essential career and life-coaching advice. Based on never-before-done research on college-educated, career-driven black women, Nelson offers her fellow “sisters"—and those who know, love, and work with them—a feel-good volume for personal and professional success that empowers them without tearing others down.
With this purported new "era of high-profile, mega successful, black women who are changing the face of every major field worldwide" and growing socioeconomic diversity among black women as the backdrop, Embracing Sisterhood seeks to determine where contemporary black women's ideas of black womanhood and sisterhood merge with social class status to shape certain attachments and detachments among them. Similarities as well as variations in how black women of different social backgrounds perceive and live black womanhood are interpreted for a range of social contexts. This book confirms what many of today's African-American women and interested observers have known for some time: Conceptions and experience of black womanhood are quite diverse and appear to have grown more diverse over time. However, the potential for a pervasive and polarizing black "step-sisterhood" is considerably undermined by the passion with which these women cling to the promises of cross-class gender/ethnic "community" and of group determination. Embracing Sisterhood draws its analysis from in-depth interviews with eighty-eight contemporary black women aged 18 to 89 covering a variety of issues prompted by a survey questionnaire capturing various dimensions of gender/ethnic identity and consciousness.
