“Now That I Am Forever with Child”: Black Female Intellectuals on Motherhood, 1970–85

For thirty years, the theory of intersectionality as posited by Kimberlé Crenshaw has influenced scholarship and has even in the past decade informed public discourse over issues of gender, race, and class. However, Crenshaw’s publications did not mark the birth of this theoretical framework. Black female intellectuals such as Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Maya Angelou, June Jordan, Alice Walker, and bell hooks had spent the two decades prior to Crenshaw’s publications theorizing about black womanhood and elaborating on the many realities of black female experiences. Their writings came in response to the prevalent negative stereotypes of black women in media and propagated by politicians such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Ronald Reagan. Through their published works, these female intellectuals created a diverse picture of black womanhood and its role in the black family, the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle, and in the Women’s Liberation movement. My paper examines the responses of black female intellectuals to these negative stereotypes in the 1970s and 1980s.

By tracing the evolution of these black female intellectuals’ responses to negative stereotyping, this paper documents these intellectuals’ efforts to create new definitions of black womanhood which did not rely on racist rhetoric. Black motherhood became an important theme for black female intellectuals to address because it had been so maligned and because these intellectuals felt that the realities of black motherhood could reveal the many systemic issues which black women had struggled against for decades. By making black motherhood a central theme in their published works and private correspondences, black female intellectuals explored issues of race, class, and gender and developed a theoretical framework for the theory of intersectionality.