Black Women's Studies

912 Words4 Pages
ETST 310 Black women’s studies Black women’s studies emerged in part because of the failure of women studies and black studies to address accurate and dependable information about the experiences of black women in America and everywhere else in the world. Black women felt ignored by both the black man and the white women during their radical liberation movements towards liberty and equality. In history women’s studies have exclusively focused mainly that is to say entirely on the lives and history of the white women. Because of things like that when “black” was used in context of a conversation or publication it was equated with the black male, while women was to the white female. These issues are what inevitably formed…show more content…
Although there were several different movements for black liberation (the Civil Rights Movement, Black Nationalism, the Black Panthers, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and others) they are all considered under the title Black Liberation Movement. The movement, though seemingly for the liberation of the black race, was in word and deed for the liberation of the “black” male not the women. Race was extremely sexualized in the rhetoric of the movement. Freedom was equated with manhood and the freedom of blacks with the face of black masculinity. Take, for example, the assumption that racism is more harmful to black men than it is to black women because the real tragedy of racism is the loss of manhood; this assumption illustrates both an acceptance of masculinity defined within the context of patriarchy as well as a disregard for the human to feel the need for integrity and…show more content…
It generally took the form of exclusion. Black women were not invited to participate on conference panels, which were not specifically about black or Third World women. They were not equally, or even proportionately, represented on the faculty of Women's Studies Departments, nor were there classes devoted specifically to the study of black women's history. In most women's movement writings, the experiences of white, middle class women were described as universal "women's experiences," largely ignoring the differences of black and white women's experiences due to race and class. Most of the literature that wrote maybe not about black women in specific but spoke of them, only talked about the black women as the family matriarch or the caretaker of the home. It was not till later years and further examination was the view of the black women publicized with
Open Document