This Battlefield Called Life

Broke down barriers between the private and the public spheres through testimony and reasearch pertaining to the early private lives of black women

"Revolutionaries, regardless of sex, are the smashers of myths and the destroyers of illusion. They have always died and lived again to build new myths. They dare to dream of a utopia, a new kind of synthesis and equilibrium." (Haden, Middleton & Robinson 1969. Kelley p 148)

Radical Humanism: set the stage for advocacy on behalf of the queer community

Saw open discussion and exploration of sexuality as “…one of the few conceptual spaces we have to construct a politics of desire and to open our imagination to new ways of living and seeing” – paraphrase of Cheryl Clarke (Kelley, 155)

Liberation as Imagination

POETS

TEACHERS

STORYTELLERS

MOTHERS

PREACHERS

PAINTERS

BLUES SINGERS

A Revolution in Three Parts

Patricia Haden, Donna Middleton and Pat Robinson

• focused on class differences and power constructions WITHIN the black community.

Early Years of Radical Black Feminism

• overthrow capitalism
• eliminate male supremacy
• transform/de-colonize the self

"a revolutionary black movement without an understanding of class struggle was worthless, and a class struggle that did not consider gender and sexuality was equally worthless"

Dismantling Dissemblance: The Personal as the Political

TONI CANCADE BAMBARA

"The rise of black anti-feminism, often spearheaded by a focus on endangered black masculinity, has rekindled false assumptions that black women's efforts to resist sexism...are an attack on black life" Bell Hooks, Sisters of the Yam, 1993

FAMILY MOTHERHOOD

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women & Self Recovery

REPRODUCTION

ANGELA DAVIS

"When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally" (5)

bell hooks

Organizational Roots

This Battlefield Called Life: Black Feminist Dreams

• Formed from male-dominated spaces such as the Black Panther Party & Black Liberation Army
• Black women formed several autonomous organizations such
• The Black Women's Liberation Committee in SNCC
• Third World Women's Alliance
• Black Women Organizing for Action [Oakland]
• Black Women Enraged [Harlem]
• Focused on intersectionality of race, class, gender & expanded to issues faced by women throughout the world

Background & Context

The Roots of Contemporary Radical Black Feminism

Resistance within the Black Liberation Movement: Moynihan's Emasculating Black Women

Exclusion from Mainstream Movements

• Sexism within the Black Liberation Movement: Male leadership saw women's roles as mothers and silent supporters.
• Spawned from the Moynihan Report (1965): "Pathology" of the black family due to over-masculine black women and their degeneration of the black family unit/community
• Sexually & socially conservative politics birth control

Critiques of White Feminism

• published in 2002
• Part of "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination"
• Key Themes
• intersectionality/multiple oppression
• dissemblance & respectability
• radical humanism
• revolutionary imagination

Age Race Class & Sex: Women Redefining Difference

• Sister Outsider, 1984
• critiques popular conceptions of universal womanhood
• Focus on differences does not divide us, but to produce a stronger front; differences cannot be ignored, and we cannot be colorblind when addressing issues of power.

Audre Lorde

• comparisons of gender inequality with racial inequality & slavery
• refusal to acknowledge distinctions of age, race, class and sexuality & the power relations between women

"As white women ignore their built in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of color become 'other', the outsider whose experience and tradition is too 'alien' to comprehend." (Lorde, 1984, 117)

• did not recognize the variant impacts that certain phenomenon had on women of different backgrounds sterilization & motherhood
• history of racism within the feminist movement
• prior commitment to culturally-specific organizations and movements
• "feminists" reliance on black domestic labor

Robin D.G. Kelley