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Hine Sight: Black Women and the Re-Construction of American History: U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays
ROBYN MUNCY
In these two collections of essays, some of the leading lights of U.S. women's history represent the current state of that enterprise, its vitality, and its significance.
In Hine Sight, Darlene Clark Hine, one of the most prolific black women's historians, brings together fourteen essays that she first published between 1979 and 1983. The collection works well as a book, developing several themes: the critical role that black women have played in creating black communities, especially as institution builders; the struggle of black women against demeaning stereotypes that drew them as sexually promiscuous; and the differences between black women's experience on the one hand and black men's and white women's on the other.
Defining these themes is one of the contributions of Hine's book, and she pursues them in essays whose focuses range from female slave resistance to the battle to integrate black nurses into the armed forces during World War II. The essays also succeed in bringing together much information on black women -- especially as professionals and activists -- and framing fruitful questions for future study.
One of the most obvious conclusions produced by the collected essays is that responses to sexual abuse are at the heart of early-twentiethcentury black women's history. Hine attributes women's participation in the Great Migration, for instance, in part to the desire to escape sexual violence; the formation of black women's clubs in part to a need to oppose stereotypes of black women as sexually promiscuous; the development of a "culture of dissemblance" among black women to the experience or threat of rape. Nowhere is there assembled a more compelling set of arguments for the centrality of sexuality to historical explanation.
For all of its precise research and thoughtful questions, however, the book presents certain shortcomings. Perhaps most obvious is that Hine is rarely critical of black women. Reading these essays, one would think that black women never made errors of judgment, displayed class arrogance, or failed in generosity. Although Hine acknowledges that her...