The writings of Toni Cade Bambara have been cited by writers, both black and white, as some of the most groundbreaking work on documenting the emergence of black feminism in the late 1960s and early 70s. Her publication The Black Woman: An Anthology is considered the first “major contribution in the development of Black women’s literature.”12 She also served as editor of Women Writers of the Contemporary South and Black Women Writers at Work. Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition and Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers are two of her best-known works. Christian was the first African American woman awarded tenure at Berkeley in 1978 and became a full professor in 1986.13 Angela Y. Davis, scholar and political activist, a professor in the History of Consciousness at the University of California– Santa Cruz, has written extensively on black liberation politics and prison reform. A former member of the Black Panther Party, she became someone who intimately knows the U.S. justice system after having been incarcerated and put on trial in 1970 in a sensational case in which she was later acquitted of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. This experience made her a worldwide “cause celeb”: “Free Angela Davis” was the rallying cry. This also provided her a unique entrée and perspective on racism and political oppression. Influential works such as Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith’s anthology All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies and Smith’s edited collection Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology challenged the prevailing notions of racial and sexual bias within and outside of the academy.
Others used poetry, playwriting, and essays as the avenues for their expressions, reaching audiences from around the world; such as the prolific writer bell hooks, who taught at Yale, the University of California, Oberlin, and was a distinguished professor of English at the City College in New York.14 Essential to the discussion about feminists’ writings centering on the intersection of race and sex are the poetry and essays of Audre Lorde—she chronicles the struggles of a black lesbian feminist poet and mother in Sister Outsider and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Cancer Journals records her battle with breast cancer. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are prolific writers that embraced the labels of controversial, insightful, and creative from their first ventures in feminist writing. Examples of their early writings, The Bluest Eye and In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, respectively, are still cited and studied in academic departments around the world. Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Bell Scott are recognized authorities on black feminist scholarship and are founding coeditors of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women. Pat Parker and Michele Wallace, two lesbian, radical, and revolutionary writers, wrote about contemporary political issues as well as domestic and sexual violence against women. Wallace’s seminal work Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman created an enormous storm of controversy with her negative depiction of black men. Johnnetta B. Cole and Pauli Murray represent the diverse professions drawn to the feminist movement. Cole, primarily known for her tenure as the first African American female president of the renowned Atlanta school for African American women, Spelman College, was also named Emory University’s Presidential Distinguished Professor of anthropology, women’s studies, and African American Studies.15 She has written consistently on women’s issues including coauthoring with Beverly Guy-Sheftall Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities. Pauli Murray was a founding member of the National Organization of Women (NOW), a lawyer, and poet. Her autobiography (published posthumously), Song in a Weary Throat: An American Pilgrimage, “recounts her awakening to both racial and gender inequities and eloquently explains how she shaped herself into the civil rights’ activist and feminist she became.”16 In her later life, she became the first ordained woman African American Episcopal priest in the United States. The depth and breadth of writing by these women should be discoverable within the research tools available today. Table 1 lists the texts consulted in making the selection of black feminist writers to include in the study.
The pTW feminists were influenced by the SW writers and those that wrote in the 1980s, but who were most active prior to the 1990s when the Third Wave of the feminist movement is commonly thought to have begun. During the period after 1975, there continued a consistent outpouring of writings by black feminists writers who chose a path that would not necessarily distance them from the larger women’s movement, but carve out for them a unique identity as black feminists. This new theory used by many black women writers and coined by author Alice Walker to distinguish them from the white female-dominated feminist movement is termed womanism—the bridge between the two sides of feminism, black and white. Walker defines this concept as a “woman who gains her strength from her community and uses that strength to uplift her people, physically, spiritually, economically, and politically.”17 The twenty-five writers who work within this womanist tradition represent a small number of the literally hundreds of writers who could have been chosen for this survey. Based on the genre and focus of their research and writings, these writers fall into several broad groups. Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, Gayl Jones, June Jordan, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Joyce Carol Thomas, and Margaret Walker Alexander have all blurred the lines between poetry, essays, and fiction writing for years. Each of these women has received numerous accolades for their works. Gwendolyn Brooks and Rita Dove are also well-known poets, each having been named Poet Laureate of the United States in 1985–86 and 1993–95 respectively. Terry McMillan, Gloria Naylor, and Ntozake Shange have all written plays and popular literature that focus on relationships between women and men. Patricia Hill Collins, Deborah E. McDowell, Trudier Harris, Jacqueline C. Jones, Paule Marshall, Nellie McKay, Valerie Smith, Hortense Spillars, Claudia Tate, and Gloria Wade-Gayles are known for academic scholarship that focuses on women’s studies, ethnic and gender equity, and literary criticism. Octavia Butler writes science fiction that has female central characters. Ann Allen Shockley has written novels and is a curator of African American collections at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Table 2 lists the writers and the leading feminist texts in which they are represented. Some Second Wave and pre-Third Wave writers overlap in age and time, either due to the popularity of their writings only taking hold after the earlier dates, or due to their publication after the Second Wave had passed. The criteria for selection of these writers were that they had to have written and published at least three scholarly articles or books.
Methods
The American Library Association’s Association of College and Research Libraries Women’s Studies Section’s (ACRL/WSS) “Collection Development Resources,” the University of California at Davis’s extensive Women and Gender Studies study guide, Hope Olsen’s Information Sources in Women’s Studies and Feminism, and Texas A&M University’s women’s studies guide developed by librarian Nancy Northup were consulted in the development of the database and readings list.18 The databases chosen were the most widely used and available sources of literature that contain comprehensive coverage of periodical articles, literary works, popular and alternative literature, book reviews, essays, and other writings in women’s studies.
The twelve databases chosen are consistently listed as the major databases for the study of feminist writings and literature in general: Alternative Press Index includes the API Archives, Black Studies Center, Black Women Writers, Communication Studies, Contemporary Women’s Issues, Essay and General Literature Review, Gender Studies Database, GenderWatch, MLA Bibliography, Periodicals Index Online, Web of Science, and Women and Social Movements. Two of the databases, Black Studies Center and Black Women Writers cover a wide range of material specifically related to black women’s literature. Each of the forty writers’ works were searched in these databases, using the author search option when available, with the results divided into three sections: peer-reviewed; not peer-reviewed; and books, anthologies, or edited works. The difference between finding peer-reviewed materials versus not peer-reviewed means that the views of the writers are considered scholarly and have a better chance of becoming a part of the canon of scholarship in a particular subject or discipline, in this instance ensuring that black feminist scholarship is considered within the larger feminist ideological and theoretical paradigm. The combined databases contain millions of pages of information and offer the most sophisticated approaches to discovering research material.
Results
Uncovering the depth of coverage of black feminist writings within the most commonly available research tools for the scholarly community today presented a number of challenges. The standards used to evaluate the databases included scope, format, ease of use of the search interface (location on home page, help screens, and multiple search strategies), full-text availability, and peer reviewing. The search results were restricted to only those writings authored by the individual writers. Some databases did not offer author searches, so alternative search strategies were used and will be further explained in the discussion section. Tables 3 and 4 tabulate the frequency of writings by the authors within each of the twelve databases. The overall results of the survey showed that the National Information Services Corporation’s (NISC) Gender Studies Database (GSD) and ProQuest’s databases, Black Studies Center (BSC) and Periodical Index Online (PIO), covered all the authors in this study. All three databases have very simple search interfaces that can be accessed from their home page. While the top three databases were chosen for very different reasons, ease of search and scope of coverage for each of the selected writers are shared qualities for these resources.
