Young Black Feminist

YBF is dedicated to the celebration of young Black womanhood. From loving ourselves to fighting for equality, we honor the journeys of young Black women. Click 'About' to learn more.

[marxisforbros]

Conversation with a Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin

[biscuitsarenice]

[thefreeblackwomanslibrary]

Socialite Mollie Moon Used Fashion Shows to Fund the Civil Rights Movement

In the 1950s, famed Harlem socialite Mollie Moon transformed the Ebony Fashion Fair into a powerhouse fundraiser for Civil Rights movement w

[queengreendown]

Adulthood is essentially self-ownership, accountability, and the working understanding that one's survival/happiness is largely her own burden. Becoming an active participant in the authorship of your life is how you blossom into an adult. Everyone approaches that responsibility differently, and some don't even attempt to get close. Age is a matter of pacing. Adulthood is not inevitable. Some of us are children forever, scared forever, in denial forever. Sovereignty is a serious choice. And it is also an exhilarating one.

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The faces of child marriage

Tehani, 8, Yemen. “Whenever I saw him, I hid. I hated to see him,” Tehani (in pink) recalls of the early days of her marriage to Majed, when she was 6 and he was 25. The young wife posed for a portrait with former classmate Ghada, also a child bride, outside their home in Hajjah.

Destaye, 11, and Addisu, 23, Ethiopia. Addisu and his new bride Destaye are married in a traditional Ethiopian Orthodox wedding in the rural areas outside the city of Gondar, Ethiopia. Community members said that because of his standing as a priest, Addisu’s bride had to be a virgin. This was the reason Destaye was given to him at such a young age.

Rajani, 5, India. Long after midnight, Rajani is roused from sleep and carried by her uncle to her wedding. Child marriage is illegal in India, so ceremonies are often held in the wee hours of the morning. It becomes a secret the whole village keeps, explained one farmer.

Bishal, 15, and Surita, 16, Nepal. Bishal accepts gifts from visitors as his new bride, Surita, sits bored at her new home. Here in Nepal, as in many countries, not only girls, but boys too are married young.

Faiz, 40, and Ghulam, 11, Afghanistan. Ghulam and Faiz sit for a portrait in her home before their wedding in Afghanistan. According to the U.S. Department of State report “Human Rights Practices for 2011,” approximately 60 percent of girls were married younger than the legal age of 16. Once the girl’s father has agreed to the engagement, she is pulled out of school immediately.

Sarita, 15, India. Sarita is seen in tears before she is sent to her new home with her new groom. The previous day, she and her 8-year-old sister Maya were married to sibling brothers.

Leyualem is transported by mule to her new home on her wedding day. The men later said the cloth was placed over her head so she would not be able to find her way back home, should she want to escape the marriage.

Asia, 14, Yemen. Asia washes her newborn at home in Hajjah while her 2-year-old daughter plays. Asia is still bleeding and ill from childbirth, yet has no knowledge of how to care for herself or access to maternal health care.

Mejgon, 16, Afghanistan. Mejgon weeps in the arms of her case worker near fellow residents at an NGO shelter run by Afghan women in Herat, Afghanistan. Mejgon’s father sold her at the age of 11 to a 60-year-old man for two boxes of heroin.

Jamila, 15, Afghanistan. Kandahar policewoman Malalai Kakar arrests a man who repeatedly stabbed his wife, 15 and mother of two children, for disobeying him. When asked what would happen to the husband for this crime, “Nothing,” Kakar said. “Men are kings here.” Kakar was later killed by the Taliban.

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China, 18, Ethiopia. A young sex worker named China sits stunned after being beat up by a client. Many of the girls who run away from child marriages end up trafficked to brothels where they often face intense violence.

Bibi Aisha, 19, Afghanistan. In a practice known as “baad,” Bibi Aisha’s father promised her to a Taliban fighter when she was 6 years old as compensation for a killing that a member of her family had committed. She was married at 16 and subjected to constant abuse. At 18, she fled the abuse but was caught by police, jailed and then returned to her family. Her father-in-law, husband and three other family members took her into the mountains, cut off her nose and her ears, and left her to die. “I was a woman exchanged for someone else’s wrongdoing. [My new husband] was looking for an excuse to beat me.”

Maya and Kishore pose for a wedding photo in their new home.

Nujood, 12, Yemen. Nujood Ali, two years after her divorce from her husband, who was more than 20 years her senior. Nujood’s story sent shock waves around the country and caused parliament to consider a bill writing a minimum marriage age into law. The bill is still pending. “Don’t let your children get married. You’ll spoil their educations, and you’ll spoil their childhoods [if] you let them get married so young.”

[thevaginamonoblogs]

Talk to me about how women aren’t oppressed and I’ll kick you in the nuts and show you this.

[greenwire]

Bibi Aisha emigrated to the United States where she underwent several dozen reconstructive procedures and was adopted by an Afghan-American couple in Maryland. For whatever it’s worth, she is no longer living in the same conditions. I wish that could be said about all of the child brides in the world, but we know it cannot. 

These children were not sold as property to grown men because of how they identified. Their parents were not confused about which of their children to sell to terrorists and adult men. 

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With Rajani, I saw that she was married to a 10 year old boy. Leagues better than an adult man. And that she would live with her family until puberty. Definitely not the best outcome but certainly better that others in her situation.

With Nujood, according to Wikipedia, her father never gave her the money from the profits of her book. She got married again in 2014 which would put her at 15 or 16 and now has two children.

The photos and captions come from a series done by photographer Stephanie Sinclair. The series is called “Too Young to Wed”.

From the United Nation’s website:

Too Young To Wed portrays child marriage, a harmful practice that devastates the lives of millions of girls who are forced to marry each year. Child marriage is a human rights violation that is commonplace in dozens of countries, even where laws forbid the practice.

The exhibition was organized by VII Photo Agency and endorsed by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA)

Learn more about child marriage at: tooyoungtowed.org

[queengreendown]

It is incredible how much love is in the world, awaiting me. I don’t know why it’s happening now–why I feel the flowers bursting from the valleys in my heart. Perhaps they’ve had enough rain. 

The sun cuts right to the chase. I drive to the grocery store that’s farther away just to enjoy it longer. I play the same song four times back to back. The wind is in my lashes. My eyes reflect the honey of the bees. I mean…love turns up in every blade of grass when your mind is open. That’s what I’m getting at.

I’m giddy because you don’t realize the weight of worrying until you drop everything and breathe. I can do anything I want to, and that is the hill worth climbing on. Love is knowing that I can succeed. Joy is the ultimate success. You have to choose which thoughts to believe.

[loveletter2you]

bell hooks, All About Love

[gretchen-anner]

conditions of love: the philosophy of intimacy

[ar-rad]

enormous documentation

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

[xoxoxogossipgirlll]

i don’t know why people can’t understand that it is perfectly possible to be critical of the sex industry, porn, prostitution and all the evil that it brings without hating the very women that are victims from it. is critical thinking so dead?

[queengreendown]

I wanna be touched in a real, tender, comfortable way by someone who ain't always too busy for me. I wanna be loved thoroughly and slowly because it's transformative, not because it's a chore or obligation. I wanna be constantly and pleasantly surprised because pleasure itself is expansive, creative, and surprising. Unfolding my self-mystery is a joy and an honor, and I refuse to settle for boredom. I love easily because I am easy to love. Don't fuck with me if it's so damn excruciating to connect, to go slow, or to stay. I'm not that lonely.

[queengreendown]

Our righteous leaders who have been gunned down in the past have already told us. The freedom we require in order to experience our full humanity will not be acquired thru diplomacy...because the people withholding that freedom or denying that humanity are not diplomatic. Violence is sometimes the answer. And violence is not just a physical thing. Violence is a state of mind--one that says I will slit your throat to protect my soul. Violence can be defined as a "swift and intense force." So that includes joy, love, one's determination to be present, and, finally, the truth. Liberation will not be handed to us in any form other than reluctant crumbs, and we're wasting our time tryna keep the peace with monsters. Period.

[westindianheaux]

“A culture of hooking up also peddles a set of norms that are incredibly narcissistic. It teaches people that the only person who matters when it comes to sex is oneself, that partners are objects to be used and discarded or not thought of at all. Hookup culture assumes that participants shouldn’t care about sex or their partners, that it is normal not to care, which means if you do care, you are abnormal. This makes hookup culture self- emptying: it decenters sexual intimacy from the person and tells everyone to treat sex as meaningless. It requires a person to give up his or her own interests in sex and the self- care of the body because it is “normal” to allow another person to treat you as an object for his or her personal use,”

—

Donna Freitas, Consent on Campus

[zootycoon-archive]

want a shirt that says YOU SHOULD FEEL VISCERALLY VIOLATED BY THE UNSTOPPABLE CORPORATE ENCROACHMENTS ON YOUR ATTENTION SPAN, BY THE FACT THAT YOU STARTLE LIKE A TRAINED ANIMAL AT EVERY NOTIFICATION, BOTH OVERSTIMULATED AND BORED, LETHARGIC AND JUMPY, WAITING FOR THE NEXT BIT OF VALIDATION WITH THE SAME SICKLY EXCITEMENT AND FEAR AS A GAMBLER AT THE TABLE

[solarpunkcast]

Angela Davis & Ursula K Le Guin, visionary women for a hopeful future

[pastperfectcontinuous]

“As more and more people find themselves working at jobs that are in fact beneath their abilities, as leisure and sociability themselves take on the qualities of work, the posture of cynical detachment becomes the dominant style of everyday intercourse (...) The disparity between romance and reality, the world of the beautiful people and the workaday world, gives rise to an ironic detachment that dulls pain but also cripples the will to change social conditions, to make even modest improvements in work and play, and to restore meaning and dignity to everyday life.”

—Christopher Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations

[thefreeblackwomanslibrary]

“The word caste is a reminder of an infrastructure beneath something that is larger, it sits beneath the foundation. It is the foundation and the framework for how people interact with one another, so I have come to believe that caste is the infrastructure, the hierarchies, that we often don’t see, the bones of a thing. I think of caste as the bones and race as the skin. And that is a way to see that race is used, or has been used as the cue as the signal as the indicator of where an individual fits in a pre-existing hierarchy that has been created from a time of Colonial era America.” -

@isabelwilkerson ⭐️

Just added to The Free Black Women’s Library Wish List!!

The newly released CASTE/THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENT by the brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist Isabel Wilkerson, writer of best selling favorite, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS.

Deeply intrigued and desiring this new work that explores and explains caste as the “infrastructure of our divisions” while examining the industry of slavery, class, the value of life, American history and the unconscious bias that takes place within the hierarchy that caste systems produce.

This books sounds incredible.

Feel free to check the link in the bio for lists of online Black bookstores to order a copy for us and for yourself 😉🖤⭐️☺️

Our address:

The Free Black Women’s Library

1072 Bedford Avenue

Box 39

Brooklyn, NY 11216

We lovingly appreciate all books by Black Women.

Thank you 🖤