Black women

Black women are women of sub-Saharan African and Afro-diasporic descent, as well as women of Australian Aboriginal^[1] and Melanesian descent. The term 'Black' is a racial classification of people, the definition of which has shifted over time and across cultures. As a result, the term 'Black women' describes a wide range of cultural identities with several meanings around the world.

Intersectionality and misogynoir

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw developed the theory of intersectionality, which highlighted the overlapping discrimination faced by Black women (on the basis of both race and gender) in the United States. The theory has been influential in the fields of feminism and critical race theory as a methodology for interpreting the ways in which overlapping social identities relate to systems of oppression.^[2] More recently the term misogynoir has been created to describe the specific effect of intersectionality on Black women.^[3] Misogynoir is the term that is used to describe the overlapping cases of misogyny and racism. Examples of misogynoir experienced by Black women include the stereotype of the angry Black woman and vulnerability to sex trafficking among others.^[4] These more specific terms were created as Black women have been historically left out of movements for both racial justice and feminist equality.^[5]

Around the world

Africa

The 2003 Maputo Protocol on women's rights in Africa set the continental standard for progressive expansion of women's rights. It guarantees comprehensive rights to women including the right to take part in the political process, to social and political equality with men, improved autonomy in their reproductive health decisions, and an end to female genital mutilation.^[6]

Ghana

Women play a modest role in Ghana's two major political parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and New Patriotic Party (NP), as well as in the Convention People's Party (CPP). The first president, Kwame Nkrumah (CPP), made Ghana the first African nation to introduce a quota in 1959, reserving 10 seats for women in Parliament. Ghana has recently been laggard, however, with a representation of 11% women after the election in 2012 and 13% after the election in 2016.^[7]

Tunisia

In Tunisia Black women are victims of double discrimination, facing prejudice both because of their gender and race.^[8] Testimonial evidences complied by the Tunis-branch of Rosa Luxemburg Foundation presented cases of Black women being "stigmatised, hyper-sexualised, and objectified"^[9] It has been noted that this sexualization of Black Tunisian women leads to them being viewed as objects by Arab men to "achieve sexual satisfaction" and face sexual harassment.^[10]

The feminist movement in the Arab world—including Tunisia—has been labelled as racist, failing to take into consideration the issues of women that are not Arab; this has led to parallels between Arab feminism and White feminism.^[11] In 2020, four Black Tunisian women created the Facebook group Voices of Tunisian Black Women in an attempt to bring to light these issues affecting them, which they felt were not being discussed in the Me Too movement.^[8]

Caribbean

Caribbean society

Jennifer Palmer argues that in the plantation world of the colonial Caribbean, women of color were typically treated as property owned by White men. In the French islands, race and gender shape popular assumptions about who could own property. However there were legal loopholes that sometimes opened up windows of opportunity for women of color to be landowners.^[12]

United States

The field of Black women’s history has generated a plethora of scholarship for more than a century. Anna Julia Cooper, the first African American woman to receive her PhD in History and Romance Languages (University of Paris, the Sorbonne, 1925) was part of a small group of early historians. Cooper is widely regarded as one of the first writers of Black feminist thought.[1] In the 1940s several Black women received their PhDs in History including Marion Thompson Wright who was the first to earn a PhD in the United States (Columbia University). Over the last fifty years, female scholars have published numerous works on Black women including anthologies, encyclopedias, primary document readers, biographies, and thematic studies of women in the diaspora.

Black women’s history emerged as a unique field in the early 1970s, in the heart of the women’s rights movement, at a time when colleges and universities established women’s studies programs and courses. In 1970, Toni Cade published the anthology, The Black Woman, as one of the first seminal collections of writings about Black women.[2] Two years later, Gerda Lerner released a primary document reader, Black Women in White America, a book filled with evidence of Black women’s contributions to American history. Adopted for classroom use, Lerner’s book served as the first compilation of document driven histories of Black women in America. Following her, historians Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn published The Afro-American Woman: Struggles & Images (1978).[3] These volumes served as starting points for the field.[4]

Black women demonstrate for Women's Liberation in the 1960s with signs that read "Free Our Sisters Free Ourselves" and "Women's Liberation" with a raised fist “Women’s Liberation” meant addressing specific challenges for black women in the 1960s. (David Fenton/Getty Images via Timeline/Medium) Many of these early writers were activists in the classroom and in their communities. The scholarship they produced in the 1970s evolved in a period of activism where women fought to be recognized in society, at colleges and universities, and in historical scholarship. Such activism, particularly among Black lesbian women who attended the Combahee River Collective in 1974, forced mainstream scholars to consider the diversity of Black women’s experiences in America. Women at Combahee illustrated how their experiences intersected along multiple categories including race, class, and sexuality, offering experiences that Kimberlee Crenshaw a decade later called “intersectionality.”[5] They also prompted a proliferation of texts that addressed how Black women lived, worked, and loved at these intersections.

Three rows of young African American women dressed in white nursing uniforms and headresses. Women’s War Relief Club, Syracuse, New York c.1914 (Jesse Alexander Photograph Collection NYPL/Schomburg Center) The 1980s marked the first significant increase in publications in the field of Black women’s history. So, it is not a surprise that the nascent field welcomed Angela Davis’s, Women, Race, & Class (1981) as writers began to consider the dynamic nature of Black womanhood, again, prior to having a term to describe it. Like their foremothers a decade earlier, writers in this decade also published primary document anthologies such as Dorothy Sterling’s We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984).

The eighties also produced books that provided overviews of Black women’s experiences such as Paula Giddings’s groundbreaking study, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984). A year later, Deborah Gray White answered Angela Davis’s call to explore the experiences of enslaved women with Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) and Jacqueline Jones examined Black women’s experience with unpaid and paid work in Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985).

An African American woman is hanging quilts on a clothes line. The women of Gee’s Bend—a small Black community in Alabama—have created hundreds of quilt masterpieces dating from the early twentieth century to the present. (Photo: Gee’s Bend Quiltmakers) By the 1990s the field had been in full force for about twenty years with a growing national organization. The Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), founded in 1979, became the professional and professionalizing steward of the field. Pioneering historians of the previous two decades mentored students and kept publishing work in the field. Darlene Clark Hine, an institution building scholar, helped push the field in several directions by publishing books, reference works, and anthologies.[6] After decades of work, she would receive recognition from President Barack Obama in 2013 with the National Humanities Medal. Along with Giddings’ When and Where I Enter in the 1980s, Hine and Kathleen Thompson’s A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (1998) served as foundational texts for the field for next two decades. These books shaped and fueled an abundance of scholarship in the nineties, including work by the founders of ABWH and others who pioneered defining theoretical approaches to Black women’s history and confirmed that we have a clear canon. These included but were not limited to Hines’ “culture of dissemblance,” Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s “politics of respectability,” and Ula Y. Taylor’s “community feminism,” among others.[7]

Scholarship from the turn of the century in 2000 until today has witnessed a dynamic boom as three generations of historians are publishing work on a variety of themes. We are at a profound moment where many of the founders of Black Women’s History are still alive and continue to publish books, articles, and anthologies. These pioneers are able to witness, shape, and support multiple generations of historians. This also means that we have a pipeline of scholars and scholarship that is building on these foundations and creating new histories that bring Black women into all aspects of American and diasporic history. The 2015 Cross Generational Dialogues in Black Women’s History conference at Michigan State University brought these scholars together to pay homage to those who created the field and those who are the future of it. Scholars of the first generation of Black women historians sent their students out to produce more work for this field. They offered studies of Black women and slavery, reconstruction, convict leasing, civil rights, Black power, and a host of other topics and time periods.^[13]

American slavery

Black slaves, many of whom were women, often faced severe abuse from their owners and other non-black people.^[14] Black female slaves were sexually abused by their owners and were bred with them in order to bear mulatto children in an attempt to maintain White supremacy, have more slaves to pick cotton and produce superior slaves in the South.^[15] Black female slaves received the same treatment in Brazil, Central America, Mexico, Peru and the Caribbean.^[16]^[17] An example of this is former president and slave owner Thomas Jefferson who fathered mixed-race children with Sally Hemings, a slave that he owned.^[18] Black slave women and their bodies were also fetishized by their white male slave owners.^[19]^[20]

Black women seeking to assert the rights of citizenship and freedom after Emancipation faced dangers based on their race and sex just as they had for generations while enslaved. Black women were killed in the same lynchings and massacres that took the lives of Black men, but they were also more likely to suffer the trauma of sexual violence.

In May 1870, 15 white men raped a Black woman while other members of the mob lynched her husband. Days later in the same North Carolina community, another white mob raped a Black woman and “afterwards stuck their knives in various parts of her body.”1 News of incidents like these spread through the entire African American community, devastating Black women with the terror of their dual vulnerability.

Enslaved Black women had no legal means to resist or protect themselves from sexual assault by white slaveowners. As early as the 1830s, Black abolitionist Maria Stewart called for the law to recognize Black women as full humans with rights to control their bodies and to grant or withhold consent, but reality lagged far behind.2 In Missouri in 1855, a young enslaved Black woman named Celia was convicted of murder and hanged for killing a white man who had enslaved and repeatedly raped her. The court rejected her self-defense claim, concluding that enslaved Black women had no right to resist white slaveowners’ sexual advances.3

White Southerners were determined to maintain the economic exploitation and political dominance they had enjoyed during slavery, and white men refused to relinquish their freedom to violate Black women with impunity. Even before the Civil War’s end, Southern state legislatures implemented laws providing different sexual protections to white women and Black women. The Georgia Code of 1861 specified a mandatory sentencing range for raping a white woman but let courts decide whether and how to punish rapes of Black women.4

Indifferent and complicit law enforcement officers undermined federal attempts to protect Black women. In October 1866, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent delivered arrest warrants for two white men accused of beating a Black woman named Silvey Soilean and killing her son, but the local Louisiana sheriff refused to arrest them.5 That summer in Louisiana, Bureau records reveal an even more devastating story:

Capt. N. B. Blanton, Sparta, reports Cuff Canara, freedman, and Dan Docking, white, had a quarrel because Docking had twice committed a rape on the freedman’s wife. Canara started to Agent of Bureau, was tracked by hounds for ten miles and fired on by Dan Docking, Norman Docking, and John Palmer. Shot in left side of back & (illegible) finally reached agent, having killed 3 out of 4 of the dogs. Warrants issued for arrest of parties but they have not been found, and from statement of people does not think they will be arrested, the people appearing to think the freedman had committed the greater crime by killing the dogs, than the man who shot him.6

Scholar Estelle Freedman writes that white people “deepened the association of rape as an act committed by a Black man against a white woman” during Reconstruction and “presumed that Black women either welcomed [forced sexual relations with white men] or had no moral purity to defend.”7 The same white men who professed a fanatical concern for white women’s purity and safety held tightly to the social and legal view of Black women as promiscuous, lacking virtue, and without the right to refuse the lust of any white man.

This particular narrative of racial difference shielded white men from shame and consequence when they employed sexual assault as yet another means of terrorizing Black communities during Reconstruction. In 1868, after a white Virginia judge was accused of assaulting a Black woman, he tried the case himself, jailed the woman overnight, and forced her husband to pay court fees.8 In June 1866, also in Virginia, a Black woman named Peggy Rich reported that a white man named James Smith had assaulted her. He attacked Ms. Rich again after he was released on bail and was later acquitted of both charges.9

In September 1866, a Black woman named Rhoda Ann Childs reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau that eight white planters had come to her Georgia home demanding to see her husband. When they learned Mrs. Childs was alone, the men kidnapped, beat, and sexually assaulted her. Mrs. Childs’s affidavit describes that one of the men “ran his pistol into me, and said he had a hell of a mind to pull the trigger,” and several of the men restrained her while one “applied the strap to my private parts until fatigued into stopping, and I was more dead than alive.” After another of the men—a former Confederate soldier—raped Mrs. Childs, the mob robbed her home and beat her daughters.10

In 1871, Harriet Simril testified before a Joint Congressional Committee that three white men had raped her in Columbia, South Carolina, after her husband refused to vote for the white supremacist ticket. In a courageous statement to federal lawmakers, Ms. Simril named her attackers and described their brutality: “spitting in my face and throwing dirt in my eyes . . . and after that they dragged me out into the big road, and they ravished me out there.”11 The details of the attack were deemed too obscene for inclusion in the committee’s published volumes but the defiant courage Ms. Simril and so many other Black women exhibited in reporting such attacks stands as enduring evidence of the sexualized terror Black women suffered during Reconstruction and their determination to survive.^[21]

Increased risk for health problems

Black women are often at a higher risk to contract certain diseases than White women are. According to the American Cancer Society, the death rate for all cancers for Black women is 14% higher than that of White women.^[22] While the probability of being diagnosed with cancer in Black women is one in three, the chance of dying from cancer is one in five.^[22] Cancer is not the only disease that disproportionately affects African-American women. Black women are three times more likely to develop uterine fibroids. Lupus is two-three times more common in women of color, but more specifically one in every 537 Black women will have lupus.^[23] Black women are also at a higher chance of being overweight thus making them open to more obesity-related diseases.^[24] There is also a racial disparity when it comes to pregnancy related deaths. While there are 12.4 deaths for every 100,000 births for White women, the statistics for Black women is 40.0 deaths for every 100,000 births.^[25] In a 2007 US study of five medical complications that are common causes of maternal death and injury, Black women were two to three times more likely to die than White women who had the same condition.^[26] The World Health Organization in 2014 estimated that Black expectant and new mothers in the United States die at about the same rate as women in countries such as Mexico and Uzbekistan.^[27] A 2018 study found that "The sexual and reproductive health of African-American women has been compromised due to multiple experiences of racism, including discriminatory healthcare practices from slavery through the post-Civil Rights era."^[28] Another 2018 study found that darker skin tones were underrepresented in medical textbook imagery and that these omissions "may provide one route through which bias enters medical treatment".^[29]

Brazil

Black women make up 28% of the Brazilian population and still suffer discrimination in Brazil. The legacy of slavery and mistreatment of Black women during the Portuguese colonial era is still dealt with today.^[30]^[31] Interracial marriage between Black women and white Portuguese men was common in Brazil.^[32] Black women were often raped by white men in Brazil in effort to whiten the Brazilian population.^[33]

Famous leaders

Some of the most important^{[clarification needed]} artistic and political leaders in history have been Black women. For instance, Queen Qalhata and Candace of Meroe are important, early African queens.^[34]^[35]

Thus far 21 Black women have been elected or appointed as head of a UN recognised state, all of which have been in Africa or in the Caribbean. The first Black woman to be appointed head of state, was Elisabeth Domitien who served as the Prime Minister of the Central African Republic from January 1975 to April 1976. The longest serving Black woman head of government was Eugenia Charles who served as the head of government for Dominica for nearly 15 years, from July 1980 to June 1995. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf served as President of Liberia for 12 years.^[36]

In 2021, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala became the first Black woman to lead a major multilateral organisation, when she was appointed Director-General of the World Trade Organization.

Four Black women have been awarded Nobel Prizes. Toni Morrison was the first Black woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, when in 1993 she was awarded the prize for literature. Wangari Maathai was the first Black woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize which she received in 2004. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.

In the United States, Toni Morrison was the first Black woman Nobel laureate. Shirley Chisholm was an important Democratic candidate for U.S. President in the 1970s. In the 2020 United States presidential election, Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden's running mate, making her the first Black and South Asian woman to be on a major party ticket. Biden won the election, making Harris the first Black/South Asian person and Black/South Asian woman to be Vice President of the United States.^[37] With Justice Stephen Breyer's announcement of his intention to retire at the end of the 2021–22 term, President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to succeed him as Supreme Court justice.^[38] She was confirmed by the United States Senate in a 53–47 vote on April 7, 2022, and took her seat on June 30, 2022.^[39]

LGBT black women

One survey found that 23% of black women age 18 to 34 identity as bisexual in the United States.^[40] Black women are increasingly identifying as bisexual.^[41] Lesbian marriage is also increasing among black women.^[42] Black trans women often face high levels of discrimination.^[43]^[44]^[45]

References

^ Morris, Bilal G. (May 24, 2022). "The Aboriginal Australians: The First Inhabitants Of Australia Were Black People". newsone.com. Newsone. Retrieved September 21, 2022. [T]he first people to roam the lands of Australia were Black migrants who arrived on the continent almost 80,000 years ago.
^ Adewunmi, Bim (April 2, 2014). "Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality: "I wanted to come up with an everyday metaphor that anyone could use"". New Statesman. Retrieved June 30, 2020.
^ Anyangwe, Eliza (October 5, 2015). "Misogynoir: where racism and sexism meet". The Guardian. Retrieved September 16, 2021.
^ Page, Cheryl (January 1, 2019). "The Double Whammy of Being Female and African-American: How Black Women are More Vulneralbe to Trafficking and Other Forms of Discrimination". Journal Publications.
^ "The Routledge Companion to Black Women's Cultural Histories". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved September 17, 2021.
^ Christine Ocran, "The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa." African Journal of International and Comparative Law 15.1 (2007): 147–152.
^ Diana Højlund Madsen, "Gender, Power and Institutional Change–The Role of Formal and Informal Institutions in Promoting Women’s Political Representation in Ghana." Journal of Asian and African Studies 54.1 (2019): 70–87.
^ ^a ^b Bajec, Alessandra (November 19, 2020). "Giving a voice to Tunisia's Black women, victims of double discrimination". Radio France Internationale. Archived from the original on February 20, 2021. Retrieved May 8, 2021.
^ Bajec, Alessandra (December 29, 2020). "The Black Tunisian women fighting 'double discrimination'". openDemocracy. Archived from the original on January 23, 2021. Retrieved May 8, 2021.
^ ElHajjaji, Chouaib (April 17, 2018). "Black Tunisian women: ceaseless erasure and post-racial illusion". openDemocracy. Archived from the original on January 26, 2021. Retrieved May 8, 2021.
^ Alghoul, Diana (April 1, 2017). "Why is the Arab feminist movement so racist?". Middle East Monitor. Archived from the original on November 12, 2020. Retrieved May 8, 2021.
^ Jennifer L. Palmer, "The fruits of their labours: Race, gender and labour in the eighteenth-century French Caribbean." French History 32.4 (2018): 471–492.
^ https://notevenpast.org/black-womens-history-in-the-us-past-present/
^ Greenberg, Kenneth S; White, Deborah Gray; Harris, J. William (1987). "Black Women and White Men in the Antebellum South". Reviews in American History. 15 (2): 252. doi:10.2307/2702176. JSTOR 2702176.
^ "Slavery in the U.S. | Boundless US History". courses.lumenlearning.com.
^ see "American Slavery in Comparative Perspective" (2019)online
^ David Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More than chattel: Black women and slavery in the Americas (Indiana University Press, 1996).
^ Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
^ "Commodification of the Black Body, Sexual Objectification and Social Hierarchies during Slavery" (PDF). Spring 2015.
^ Holmes, Caren M. (2016). "The Colonial Roots of the Racial Fetishization of Black Women". Black & Gold. 2.
^ https://eji.org/report/reconstruction-in-america/the-danger-of-freedom/sidebar/sexual-violence-targeting-black-women/
^ ^a ^b "Cancer Facts & Figures for African Americans" (PDF).
^ "Lupus facts and statistics". Lupus Foundation of America. Retrieved November 29, 2018.
^ Gillum, Richard F. (1987–2008). "Overweight and Obesity in Black Women: A Review of Published Data From The National Center for Health Statistics". Journal of the National Medical Association. 79 (8): 865–871. ISSN 0027-9684. PMC 2625572. PMID 3508218.
^ "Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System | Maternal and Infant Health | CDC". www.cdc.gov. August 7, 2018. Retrieved November 29, 2018.
^ Tucker, Myra J.; Berg, Cynthia J.; Callaghan, William M.; Hsia, Jason (2007). "The Black–White Disparity in Pregnancy-Related Mortality From 5 Conditions: Differences in Prevalence and Case-Fatality Rates". American Journal of Public Health. 97 (2). American Public Health Association: 247–251. doi:10.2105/ajph.2005.072975. ISSN 0090-0036. PMC 1781382. PMID 17194867.
^ Organization, World Health (May 12, 2014). "World health statistics 2014: a wealth of information on global public health". apps.who.int. hdl:10665/112739. Retrieved June 22, 2020.
^ Prather, Cynthia; Fuller, Taleria R.; Jeffries, William L.; Marshall, Khiya J.; Howell, A. Vyann; Belyue-Umole, Angela; King, Winifred (September 24, 2018). "Racism, African American Women, and Their Sexual and Reproductive Health: A Review of Historical and Contemporary Evidence and Implications for Health Equity". Health Equity. 2 (1): 249–259. doi:10.1089/heq.2017.0045. ISSN 2473-1242. PMC 6167003. PMID 30283874.
^ Louie, Patricia; Wilkes, Rima (April 2018). "Representations of race and skin tone in medical textbook imagery". Social Science & Medicine. 202: 38–42. doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.02.023. PMID 29501717.
^ Black Women Are Now the Largest Group in Brazil's Public Universities, Folha de S.Paulo, August 9, 2021. Translated by Kiratiana Freelon.
^ Newman-Bremang, Kathleen (March 4, 2020). "The Danger Of Being A Black Woman In Brazil". Refinery29.
^ Esteve, Albert; Edward Telles. "Racial Intermarriage in the Americas: Comparing Brazil, Cuba and the United States".
^ Funari, Pedro Paulo A.; Hall, Martin; Jones, Sian (March 7, 2013). Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge - Page 329. ISBN 9781134816163.
^ Vercoutter, Jean (January 1, 1976). The Image of the Black in Western art. Morrow. ISBN 9780688030865.
^ Walker, Robin (January 1, 2006). When We Ruled: The Ancient and Mediœval History of Black Civilisations. Every Generation Media. ISBN 9780955106804.
^ "Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf". Forbes.
^ Lerer, Lisa; Ember, Sydney (November 7, 2020). "Kamala Harris Makes History as First Woman and Woman of Color as Vice President". The New York Times. Retrieved November 14, 2020.
^ Lerer, Lisa; Ember, Sydney (February 25, 2022). "President Biden Nominates Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to Serve as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court". The White House. Retrieved March 24, 2022.
^ Hulse, Carl; Karni, Annie (April 7, 2022). "The Senate confirms Jackson, elevating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved April 7, 2022.
^ Bridges, Tristan; Mignon R. Moore (June 14, 2019). "23% of young black women now identify as bisexual". Chicago Reporter.
^ Wallace, Sara (July 31, 2019). "Why Are Black Women Increasingly Identifying as Bisexual?". The Gospel Coalition.
^ Walker, Dionne N. (March 9, 2021). "'Black Women Are Marrying—We're Marrying Each Other:' Lesbian Marriage Grows as Black Women Defy Marriage Trends". The Reckoning.
^ "United States: Transgender People at Risk of Violence". Human Rights Watch. November 18, 2021.
^ Forestiere, Annamarie (September 23, 2020). "America's War on Black Trans Women". Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.
^ Ao, Bethany (June 25, 2020). "Black trans communities suffer a greater mental-health burden from discrimination and violence". The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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