Content area
Full Text
Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds AUTHORS: KRISTIN WATERSAND CAROL B. CONAWAY UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT PRESS, BOSTON 2007 PRICE: $35.00 ISBN: 1584656340
REVIEWER: JACK CARSON, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON
In this collection called Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds, Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway have brought together some extraordinary essays about some extraordinary individuals. The extraordinary individuals are some, but not all, of the black American women intellectuals who flourished, approx., from 1830 to 1900. The essays are extraordinary, because they are about those women. When the collection mentioned was published in 2007, Waters was a professor of philosophy at Worcester State College, Worcester, MA, while Conaway was a professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Communications and the Women's Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH.
In Black Women's Intellectual Traditions, the various different essays comprising the collection are arranged into six separate parts. In Part I, there are four essays set out under the heading "Maria W Stewart: Black Feminism in Public Places;" Part II, three essays, under the heading "Incidents in the Lives: Free Women and Slaves;" Part III, three essays, under the heading "Harper, Hopkins, and Shadd Cary: Writing Our Way to Freedom;" Part IV, three essays, under the heading "Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice;" Part V, three essays, under the heading "Leadership, Activism, and the Genius of Ida B. Wells;" and Part VI, three essays, under the heading, "Black Feminist Theory: from the Nineteenth Century to the TwentyFirst."
In Black Women's Intellectual Traditions, then, there are nineteen essays. In turn, the essays were written by nineteen women professors: for each essay, one professor, and, conversely, for each professor, one essay. Otherwise worth mentioning, in the collection, there is an introduction. In it, Waters and Conaway try to place black American women's intellectual traditions within some of another context: in effect, they place things in opposition to the negative opinion that either black American women's intellectual traditions do not exist, or, if they do exist, they exist without a long past. In addition, for each essay, Waters and Conaway tell its author, and they tell something about its content.
When they looked at their collection, Waters and Conaway saw as one of its...