Since it is Black History Month, I thought it would be fitting to make a simple post about wonderful, brave, intelligent Black feminist women from (more recent) history!
Alice Walker who coined the term "womanism" to center Black women's experiences. In her 1983 essay collection In Search Of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, she wrote: "Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender."
Stormè Delarverie, a black biracial butch lesbian who threw the first punch at the 1969 Stonewall uprising, starting off the whole thing, yet Marsha P Johnson, a drag queen who turned up to Stonewall late was credited over and over again in media for what Stormè Delarverie did. Stormè Delarverie was erased not only because she's a woman but also because she's a masculine, working-class, butch lesbian. A classic tale of Black women being erased by lesbianphobic male-supremacists.
In 2006, Tarana Burke created the phrase "Me Too" as part of a grassroots movement to help young women of colour (especially those from underprivileged communities) share their experience of sexual violence. Tarana Burke was a survivor of sexual violence herself, and in 2017, after the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault revelations, actress Alyssa Milano tweeted “#MeToo,” not realising Tarana Burke had created it years before.
In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published a legal paper called: "Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex." In it, she argued that Black women are often excluded from both feminist and anti-racist movements. She coined the term "intersectionality." Kimberlé Crenshaw also launched the #SayHerName campaign to bring visibility to Black women killed by police.
