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the most disturbing publications during this decade-and-a-half-old family battle and is one of the most blatantly misogynist and racist texts to appear in print.
    Black feminist writing proliferated during this period amid rancorous debate within the black community about the relevance of the contemporary white women’s movement to black women. One of the most passionate defenders of feminist ideology to emerge, though she also delivered scathing critiques of white feminism, was bell hooks, whose pioneering monograph, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) delineated the impact of sexism on the lives of black women; analyzed the devaluation of black womanhood, both historically and contemporaneously; and discussed the persistence of racism in the women’s movement and the involvement of black women in struggles to achieve gender equality. The chapter on “Sexism and the Black Female Experience” advanced the new thesis that slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal and racist social order not only oppressed black men but also defeminized slave women. Over the next decade and a half, a substantial group of black feminist writers, among whom were Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Hull, Paula Giddings, and Barbara Christian, would redefine feminism as a broad political movement to end all forms of domination. In the words of hooks, “... feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few—and a commitment to reorganizing
U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires” (hooks, 1981, 194).
    Reminiscent of the 1890s, writing, publishing, and organizing became a major preoccupation of black feminists during the 1980s, and heeding Cooper’s words, black women were clearly speaking for themselves. Other groundbreaking texts were Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists (1980); Angela Davis’s Women, Race, and Class (1981); Filomina Chioma Steady’s The Black Woman Cross-Culturally (1981); Hull, Bell Scott, and Smith’s All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (1982); Paula Gidding’s When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Sex and Race in America (1984); Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983); Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983); Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984); Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985); and Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987). Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press was founded in 1980 by Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith for the purpose of publishing mainly feminist women of color; its mission (see brochure) was also to provide a “political support network for feminists and lesbians of color as well.” The first explicitly black feminist periodical devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African decent in the United States and throughout the world was founded in 1984 in Atlanta, Georgia, and hosted by Spelman College’s Women’s Research and Resource Center, the first feminist institute on a historically black college campus. SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women would provide a major outlet for feminist perspectives on a variety of issues including mother-daughter relationships in the black community, health, science and technology, and the situation of women in rural Africa. During its founding conference in 1983, the National Black Women’s Health