Bonnie Thornton Dill

The Dialectics of Black Womanhood.

A new scholarship about black women, strengthened by the growing acceptance of black and womens studies as distinct areas of academic inquiry and by the need to refute myths and stereotypes about black women and black family life which helped shape social policies of the mid-1960s, is examining aspects of black family life that have been overlooked or distorted. Several studies have argued that a historical tradition of work forms an essential component in the lives of Afro-American women.1 Beginning from that premise, this paper seeks to demonstrate that the emphasis on womens work role in Afro-American culture has generated alternative notions of womanhood contradictory to those that have been traditional in modern American society.2

The Costs of Exclusionary Practices in Women's Studies

As women who came to maturity during the social upheavals of the late sixties and early seventies, we entered academia to continue-in a different arena-the struggles that our foreparents had begun centuries earlier. We sought to reveal untold tales and unearth hidden images, and we believed (or at least hoped) that, once illuminated, the truths of the lives of our people-Black, brown, and working-class white-would combat the myths and stereotypes that haunted us. We were, in that sense, scholars with a special mission. In the tradition of W. E. B. DuBois, Oliver Cox, Joyce Ladner, and other pioneers, we sought to use the tools of history and social science and the media of literature and the arts to improve our peoples future and more accurately portray their past. We each had developed critical perspectives on society and sought theoretical explanations for the continued poverty and oppression of our people. We had different but related foci for our research: on Chicanos and the impact of outside resources on family structure and ethnicity; on working-class consciousness and class conflict; on Black women achieving a college education; and on the relationship of work and family for Black women private household workers. In the process of conducting it, we became acutely aware of the limitations of traditional social science with