Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions

Black Women's Intellectual Traditions challenges us not just to insert black women into feminist histories, but to expand and rework our definitions and histories of feminism and of African American intellectual traditions . . . Black Women's Intellectual Traditions is about the future as well as the past, and about what can be, as well as what has been, done. Its message should resonate with those in the academy and beyond, those explicitly identified as feminists and those who might deny (or be denied) that designation, and women and men of all races who seek to study, teach, and promote the black feminist vision of resistance to injustice.

Kristen Waters and Carol Conaway's Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds is an interpretative examination and reclamation of the intellectual traditions of African American women in North America. This volume is skillfully crafted, prominently displaying black female intellectualism and activism that is centered in a culture of resistance and grounded in traditions born of their lived experiences. This anthology represents a new paradigm for understanding the historical and contemporary intellectual production of African American women.

The reader, whether familiar with the intellectuals and traditions covered in this text or seeking knowledge about them for the first time, is guaranteed to learn something new from this masterful collection of essays.

A remarkable and invaluable anthology... I read with pleasure the splendid analyses of black women’s activism and the thought-provoking interpretations of their textured voices in slave narratives, speeches, religious sermons, letters, and expressive productions.

In one wonderfully rich and comprehensive volume, Waters and Conaway present the foundation of the groundbreaking, but little known, history of black women's early intellectual pursuits.