The Challenge of Race: Rethinking the Position of Black Women in the Field of Women's History

Gerda Lerner's article beautifully captures the major historiographic shifts and developments in women's history since 1969. It is important, thirty-five years later, to reflect on the ways in which the study of women's experiences has evolved. Perhaps the most significant ideological influence on early women's history was the feminist movement, which sought to overthrow male domination, patriarchy, and gender discrimination. As Lerner notes, the result was a proliferation of feminist scholarship in the 1980s, which placed women's voices and experiences at the center of scholarly inquiry. Specifically within the field of history, feminist thought advocated for a woman-centered approach, and argued that there was a common sisterhood among women.¹ The creation of new feminist paradigms was tremendously useful in liberating White women from scholarly neglect and oversight, and therefore a debt of gratitude is owed to the scholars who blazed the trail and took intellectual risks to create this field.

Despite the importance of these early contributions, however, I believe that the most significant progress has been made since the 1980s, after Black scholars raised critiques regarding the "implicit racism" in women's history that systematically overlooked how race and class functioned in the lives of women of color. As Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens explained, "feminists found themselves increasingly under attack for ignoring differences of race and ethnicity. The universalizing rhetoric of gender claimed to embrace all women when in fact it derived from the standpoint of usually middle-class white women in North America or northern Europe."² Although these criticisms slightly destabilized the field, the resulting creation of intersectionality, which examines how race, class, gender, and sexuality simultaneously influence women's lives, was an important step in constructing the stories of women's experiences.³ Yet as Lerner points out, the changes were not only "dramatic" and "pervasive," they were also "confusing" (13). At this moment in the development of women's history, we must be willing to look deeply at our approaches and evaluate their effectiveness. In my opinion, the scramble to incorporate race into the narrative, while critically important, was often clumsy, awkward, and strained. The problem is twofold; first, although feminism is a useful paradigm for White women, the attempt to force Black women into the same interpretive model is not applicable, and has prevented full understanding of Black women's lives. The deeper, yet interconnected, issue is that despite vast improvements in our intellectual approaches, women's historians have failed to respond adequately to the critiques launched by Black scholars nearly two decades ago.

In order to understand the current state of Black women in women's history, it is necessary to review the historiographical trends. Following the pattern of Black history and White women's history, the study of Black women initially employed a contributionist model. As Lerner suggested in her article, she was an important part of this movement to shed light on how Black women enhanced American society. In fact her anthology, Black Women in White America,published in 1972, was one of the first collections that sought to rescue Black women's voices from historical obscurity. Although Lerner also points out that there were problems with contributionism as a scholarly approach, these issues were not immediately apparent and I believe that it was a critical step in the process of uncovering the histories of people who had been ignored and silenced. Darlene Clark Hine, while similarly concerned about focusing exclusively on "superachieving or transcendent" Black women, seems to agree that our understanding of Black women has been enhanced considerably by many of these early studies on Black women.⁴

By the 1980s, Black scholars issued a new challenge, one that forced historians to move beyond the contributionist model. This movement demanded a broader understanding of the role of race and class in the lives of women of color and urged women's studies (and the women's movement) to become more expansive in their interpretations. As Lerner stated, the frustration among Black scholars stemmed from the conflation...