Where are the Women?

It’s mid-way through February, so I’m sure by now you’ve been flooded with images of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, slavery, the Civil Rights movement, and enough talk about “continuing the dream” to last you a lifetime. As we cruise on toward March and toward the time when we can comfortably forget all such unpleasantness until next winter, let us pause and take a good look at what’s really going on here. All jokes about February being the shortest month aside, “Black History Month”—and I use the term very loosely—has a glaring problem that is in dire need of attention: Where are the women?

Go ahead, say it. I know you want to. “But what about Rosa Parks?” Yes, we do indeed hear all about Rosa Parks when we learn about black history. I’ll even give you Harriet Tubman—enough of us learned about her in elementary school that I can concede that she too offers a valid example of the presence of black women in mainstream black history. But Parks and Tubman are merely exceptions to the rule. Apart from these two, can anyone honestly say that we hear about black women who have contributed in one way or another to the history of black people in America? Just to drive home the seriousness of the discrepancy in historical coverage, give this a try: right now, off the top of your head, name five black men that you learned about each February before you came to college. Easy, right? Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington…you probably could have kept going well past five. Now try the same exercise with black women. If you’re anything like most of the people I’ve talked to, you’ll start struggling around three—Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and, um, Oprah?

It isn’t as if black women haven’t been present and active the entire time. Contrary to widely held opinion, black women have made huge contributions to American history that go well beyond simply giving birth to and supporting black men. Women such as Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, and Shirley Chisholm (whom I’m ashamed to admit that I myself never heard of until I came to college) each made complex contributions to the social and political history of the United States. Thanks to Wells, the issue of lynching was forced to the front of the national conscience. Baker, among her many accomplishments, led significant grassroots efforts toward achieving civil rights for black people through the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Finally, Chisholm broke down huge barriers in American politics by becoming the first black woman elected to Congress and the first woman to make a serious bid for the presidency. However, the importance of leaders like these is simply swept under the carpet in favor of heaping nearly all of the credit for the advancement of black people on the familiar male icons.

Interestingly enough, the few black women that we do hear about often have their achievements gravely oversimplified. In the most noticeable example, mainstream history tells us that Rosa Parks simply decided one day that she wasn’t going to give up her seat on the bus, which incidentally started the Montgomery bus boycotts, and Dr. King took it from there. You never hear that she was deeply concerned with civil rights before the bus incident, serving as volunteer secretary of her NAACP chapter, or that after refusing to give up her seat and subsequently being arrested, she made it her business to educate others around the country about civil rights, quite independently of Dr. King.

Now, obviously, none of this should be surprising to anyone. Black womanhood is the epitome of the dreaded “double minority” status, so a considerable amount of historical marginalization has become par for the course. After all, women in general are brushed aside in overall American history, and apart from February, the history of black people is either not mentioned much at all or is treated as something that happened somehow separately from everything else. Additionally, black history itself is taught in the most oversimplified way possible—generally, the story goes that there was slavery, then there wasn’t slavery, things were sad for a while, then the Civil Rights movement happened, and now things are great. If you’re lucky, maybe someone threw in something about the Harlem Renaissance at some point in your life.

This condensed understanding most people grow up with does not allow room for the complexity necessary to grasp the complicated ways in which black women have contributed to the struggle of all black people. Nor is it able to contend with the added complication of womanhood—which in some cases meant that these contributions weren’t particularly welcome.

The only way to ensure that people grow up with a balanced understanding of black history is to completely revamp the way that it’s taught. People should learn early that the story of black people in America is complex and nuanced, and goes a great deal deeper than the primary, mostly male players we’ve come to identify with it. After all, if we’re going to tell the story, we might as well tell it right. But brace yourselves—this could take more than a month.



Ashton R. Lattimore ’08 is an English concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.