Black Women's History, White Women's History: The Juncture of Race and Class

Internahonal Trends γν Women's History and Feminism: Black Women's History, White Women's History: The Juncture of Race and Class Darlene Clark Hine The Black women's history project is weU underway and yet I am troubled and concerned for reasons I shaU soon explain. But first the good news. Little did I susped in 1979, when I wrote my first essay in Black women's history entitled "Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex," that within a decade there would exist over a dozen monographs and anthologies, a sixteen-volume series of articles and other writings, and scores of master theses and dissertations, not to mention a wide assortment of special reclamation projeds including the Black Women in the Middle West project, the Black Women's Oral History project of the Schlesinger Library, and the Black Women Physidans project of the Women's Medical CoUege Archives in Philadelphia. In addition SAGE: A Scholarly Journal of the Black Woman is published twice a year, and centers at Spelman CoUege in Atlanta, Georgia, and at Memphis State University in Memphis, Tennessee , concentrate on the Uves and experiences of Black and other women of color. During the past decade sessions on Black women's history have become almost commonplace at major historical conventions. Moreover, historical journals with increasing frequency have begun to pubUsh artides on Black women. Whereas I once lamented that the historical experiences of Black women had been neglected, obscured, distorted, or relegated to the back pages of our collective consdousness, such is not the case today. Black women historians have enriched our theoretical discourse and at the same time have reclaimed and made more visible the deeds of their and our forebearers. Their analyses of the intersedions of race, class, and gender, of womanist consciousness, and of the culture or art of dissimulation or dissemblance have chaUenged both Black and women's historians in profound ways. Furthermore, their contmuing search for new and more effective strategies to present, and metaphors to iUurninate, the new knowledge thus far created has inspired many to question and to review how we teach and understand both the poUtics and poetics of difference. In subtle and nuanced ways with neither fanfare nor dedaration, Black women © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 4 No. 2 (Fall) This article was first prepared for delivery at the breakfast meeting of the American Historical Association Committee on Women Historians, December 29, 1991, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, IU. 126 Journal of Women's History Fall historians have put into motion a quiet inteUectual transformation. A passage from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has resonance. He writes, ... during revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with famiUar instruments in places they have looked before. It is rather as if the professional community has been suddenly transported to another planet where famiUar objeds are seen in a different Ught and are joined by unfamiUar ones as weU___In so far as their only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding to a dUferent world.1 Since Black women entered the scholarly record, Black and white women's historians have been responding to a dUferent inteUectual world. Where this transformation, or indeed its precise contours, wiU lead us remains yet to be discovered. I am neither sanguine nor naive about the significance or impact of Black women's history. ActuaUy I have reason for disquiet. The reasons for my disquiet are varied but the two solutions are 1. that we all begin to do crossover history, and 2. that we look at class. AUow me to explain. In my survey courses I usually divide modern African-American history into four broad overlapping and interconnected themes in order to clarify the major political and economic developments, to explain the rise of competing ideologies, and to delineate the roles of representative individuals. The four broad themes are: the Civil War and Emancipation, the Great Migrations, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Changing Status of Black Women. The first three themes have and continue to command the attention of the vast...