African American women's and gender history emerged at the turn of the 20th century and developed in the wake of the civil rights, black power, and women's movements. Over the past five decades, the field has moved from the margins to the center of American history. This illustrative rather than exhaustive article examines the literature on African American women's and gender history since the 1970s. It argues that there have been two overlapping phases of African American women's and gender history. The first recovery phase focused on histories of slavery, black feminism, work, and activism. Many of these themes remained part of the second phase in African American women's and gender history that widened to focus on new themes, some of which emerged out of earlier methodologies. Moreover, this essay argues that emerging work is helping to connect the field to a wide array of topics, which promises to develop this increasingly interdisciplinary area of research.African American women's and gender history emerged at the start of the 20th century. Amateur historians like N. F. Mossell, Elizabeth Ross Haynes, and E. L. Davis were some of the earliest figures to document the lives of middle class black American women like themselves and their involvement with the club movement that was committed to racial uplift. 1 Yet, it was in the wake of the civil rights, black power, and women's movements, when African American women's and gender history f lourished. The 1970s and 1980s witnessed an outpouring of literature on black women and girls by writers such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. 2 Their varied works appeared alongside a growth in US black feminist and womanist voices. Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde among others produced popular and academic works that criticized white feminists for their focus on homogenous womanhood, middle class bias, and ignorance toward the ways race and class shaped the black female experience. 3 Works by black women writers and black feminists deeply inf luenced academic scholarship following the institutionalization of black studies and women's studies programs in colleges and universities across the US. As more women and blacks entered the academy, many historians especially Darlene Clark Hine, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Deborah Gray White, and Sharon Harley, who would come to lead the field, questioned the absence of studies on black women that tended to be overlooked in black studies that focused on men and women's history that centered on white women. Additionally, they and others challenged inaccurate myths that African American women had not made significant contributions to American politics, society, and culture. Furthermore, scholars critiqued racist and sexist images of black femininity that revolved around the stereotypes of the docile mammy, oversexualized jezebel, hot-tempered sapphire, or the angry black woman. These stereotypes stemmed from the period of transatlantic slavery and Jim Crow and inf luenced US politics. They were supp...
