What are the origins of Black Women’s Studies?

Answer 1

There have been many Black woman scholars throughout history, so a precise answer to this question is hard to pin down. But if you have to pick a one cultural moment, you should look at the splintering of the feminist movement in the 70's, and perhaps focus on the Combahee River Collective and Kimberly Williams Crenshaw. Radical feminism had great momentum, but into the late 70's and the 80's, it fractured because of the focus on what we might now call "white feminism." The mainstream radical feminist movement rejected calls put the needs of LGBT women and women of color at the forefront, instead focusing on the needs of white, middle class, straight, working women. A famous example of this rejection is when Betty Friedan rejected lesbian women's calls for inclusion and referring to them as the "lavender menace." Black women faced similar struggles in the movement, and so they separated from it. One of the most well known examples of this separation are the formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974, a Black feminist organization who created and promoted intellectual feminist discourse on the position of Black women because they saw racism in the mainstream feminist movement and sexism in the mainstream civil rights movement. Another is Kimberly Crenshaw, a Black feminist scholar who coined the phrase "intersectional feminism" for the same reasons, arguing that there was a need to the study of Black women's lives as Black people, and as women.