Farmer, Ashley D.

OUR SYNOPSIS: Ashley D. Farmer illuminates how Black women advanced the Black Power movement from the mid 1940s through the 1970s. She argues that “Black women’s collective, and, at times, conflicting debates over black womanhood show that the gendered imaginary—or activists’ idealized, public projections of black manhood and womanhood—was a critical site of Black Power activism and theorizing.” (3) Furthermore, “Black women activists’ ubiquitous engagement with redefining Black womanhood illustrates the importance of not just studying what black women did but also examining who and what they aspired to do and be.” (4) She combines speeches, artwork, essays and more to amplify these aspirations and stories. Farmer begins her narrative with the empowerment of Black women domestic workers starting in the mid 1940s, showing how “black women radicals reconfigured the idea of the domestic worker in the gendered imaginary, often framing her as a prototypical Marxist and nationalist activist.” (27) By the mid 1960s, women’s Black Power was increasingly organized, unified, and militant. Many worked through and led the emergent Black Panther Party. Also starting in the mid 1960s, East Coast Black women in cultural nationalist organizations built around Kawaida ideology constructed an African Woman ideal. While initially reinforcing patriarchy, this ideal was soon reshaped to fit a vision of Black women’s liberation. In the 1970s, many women in the Black Power movement embraced an international Pan-African mindset rooted in developing countries.