Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds. Ed. by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway. (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2007. xiv, 462 pp. Cloth, $65.00, isbn 978-1-58465-633-3. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-1-58465-634-0.)

Abstract

Readers frequently encounter the contributions of contemporary African American women intellectuals without context, mistakenly believing them to be new or isolated. As Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway assert in the introduction to their collection, Black Women's Intellectual Traditions, this “prevailing view that no long-standing black women's intellectual traditions exist” is false and damaging (p. 3). Black feminism, their collection demonstrates, is part of a “long history” of “black women's ideas that moves alongside, or in opposition to, the white discourses of feminism, liberalism, socialism, conservatism” (pp. 2–3). Part 1 features essays on the arguments and rhetorical techniques of the early nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Maria W. Stewart. In part 2, scholars consider the ways free and enslaved women resisted oppression and created alternative models of womanhood and public roles that gave them dignity and agency. Part 3 considers black feminist themes and critiques of white feminism in the fiction, speeches, and journalism of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary.