Who Should Be First?: Feminists Speak Out on the 2008 Presidential Campaign

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments When a woman’s cocoyam is well harvested, she will remember the person who planted it for her. —A proverb of the Igbo people of Nigeria The truth in this Igbo proverb is what leads us to begin our acknowledgements with a tribute to the pioneering feminists whose rejection of an exclusive race or gender analysis informs the way that we see the world writ large, and the specific way in which we followed the 2008 presidential campaign that is the subject of this book. Remember the rain that made your corn grow. —A Haitian proverb Moya Bailey, a doctoral student in Women’s Studies at Emory University, served as our research assistant for this book. For all of the ways that she helped us, including securing permissions and providing administrative support, we are profoundly grateful. Hand plow can’t make furrows by itself. —An African American saying During the 2008 presidential campaign, we collected an enormous number of articles, editorials, and blogs written by feminists who had divergent views on who should be the Democratic Party’s nominee and go on to become the president of the United States. But it was SUNY Press editor, Larin McLaughlin’s suggestion that Beverly Guy-Sheftall should do a book on this subject that led us to turn piles of written material into this edited volume. We are not only grateful to Larin McLaughlin for proposing such a book, but for the way that she was with us every inch of the way from a good idea to a finished product. xi ...