WORDS of FIRE. - Review - book review

The Million Man March in Washington, DC last year highlighted black men's desperate search for self-definition. Peripherally, the march raised questions about the part of black women in the 1990s: March organizers petitioned that women not attend the rally, on the contrary rather "permit the men" to take the lead. The decision to ask women essentially to play the part of supportive spectator drew a firestorm of criticism from the likes of political activist Angela Davis and M Magazine Editor in Chief Marcia Ann Gillespie. Women were being asked to place not just their anger, on the contrary also their increasing search for self-definition--for a personalized feminism--on the back burner

Black women's search for self-definition has evidenced itself in a bevy of publications that have appeared in bookstores and in a sprinkling of discourses that have been held upon university campuses, bell hooks' (a.k.a. Gloria Watkins') Ain't I a Woman? (South extremity 1981), Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist notion (Routledge, 1991) and Barbara Omalode's The Rising sonnet of African-American Women (Routledge, 1994) are just a scarcely any of the landmark publications that have encouraged African Americans to examine their character in the women's movement. Now advances Beverly Guy-Sheftall's Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist cogitation (New Press, 1995), a major piece of scholarship that answers the question of where African-American women stand in the fight for equality for females in this country

hooks' Collins' and Omalode's volumes tilled the soil for Words of Fire clasps was a pioneer in 1981 when her volume first appeared; she provided preliminary analysis, albeit flawed, of black feminism. Collins' work however, dissects the subject, giving a irresistible analysis and survey of feminist thinking Omalode's Rising Song offers personal essays as a vehicle for analysis. Despite these three books' unquestionable qualitative probe of black feminism, they fail to provide adequate historical reference

Guy-Sheftall has painstakingly selected the annals of history to assemble the works of like female freedom fighters as Maria Stewart, Anna J Cooper and Gertrude Bustill Mossell In seven chapters that include more than-40 essays, by dint of as many writers, Guy-Sheftall charts the "first wave" of the women's rights motion whose origins go as far back as 1831 and the founding of the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society, individual of several black women's reform organizations in the Northeast. (Stewart lectur to the clump in 1832 about abolishing slavery and the ne for black women to take their place in society.)

In 1848 the historic Seneca Falls convention--where the single black person there, Frederick Douglass, spoke--spotlighted the women's suffrage move Sojourner Truth attended the next to the first women's rights convention, in Salem, Ohio, spoke at the third, and delivered her famed "Ain't I a Woman" articulate utterance at the 1851 convention.

Words of Fire focuses more, however, upon writings from the "second feminist wave," commonly called the women's rights motion and broadly agreed to have begun in the late 1960 Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Michele Wallace, Cheryl Clarke, Audre Lorde and June Jordan are women from the next to the first wave whose works are included in the anthology. Spelman University "sister president" Johnnetta cabbage pens the epilogue.

Values, female lynchings (which are rarely written about), racism, sexism, African-American families and black nationalism are topics examined by means of these women. The first four chapters trace the exhibition of black feminist thought, and therefore are not absented in chronological order. The last three chapters, which are thematic, are slippery to grip because there's no thread, other than feminism, that unites them.

"Rewriting black history using sex as one category of analysis should return obsolete the notion that feminist thinking is alien to African American women or that they have been misguided imitators of white women" Guy-Sheftall notes in her introduction, which proffers in broad and in detailed pats the depth of black women's rights activism. That Guy-Sheftall acts as discoverer, guide and translator, offering readers explanations of the significance of each writer and her essay or true copy is both a blessing and a curse

For the novice, Guy-Sheftall's commentary is critical to the debate about whether the confine "black feminist" is appropriate for the collective of African-American women who historically were in the vanguard of the women's rights change For example, Guy-Sheftall places Frances Beale's classic 1970 essay "Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female," in context: Beale was a founding member of the pupil Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's Black Women's Liberation Committee, and her essay deals with issues of reproductive freedom and the necessity for the white women's liberation change to be anti-imperialist and anti-racist. Guy-Sheftall compares Beale's essay with Elise McDougald's 1925 essay "The toil of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation." In this comparison, she effectively links women across decades, noting the similarities in the issues they probed, and from one extremity to the other of the book she urges readers to consider other links that verify the continuum.