African-American Ideas

Like modern black radicalism, black feminism is of comparatively recent origins, although its roots reach back into the nineteenth century. The earliest foreshadowings of this ideology are found in the slave-era speeches and writings of Maria Stewart (1803–1879), Sojouner Truth (c. 1797–1883), and Frances Ellen Watkins (1825–1911). The ideas that would ultimately become the ideology of black feminism developed to a large extent during the first nadir through the speeches, writing, and practices of Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954), and Anna Julia Cooper (1859–1964). While black women activists, especially women associated with the U.S. Communist Party, such as Esther Cooper Jackson and Claudia Jones, engaged in practices and advocated philosophies that amounted to black feminism, the theory was not formally visible until the 1960s.

According to Linda Burnham, contemporary black feminism, with its emphasis on the simultaneity of overlapping oppressions—race, class, gender, sexuality—is a product of the transition from the civil rights to the black power movement. She locates the origin of this iteration of black feminism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) Black Women's Liberation Committee and later the Third World Women's Alliance, in both of which Frances Beal (1900–1987) played a leading role. This stream of black feminism has become a core component of contemporary black radicalism. It can be sharply contrasted with another stream of black feminism, womanism, as articulated by Clenora Hudson-Weems, which is more correctly viewed as a tributary of conservative black nationalism.