Three decades of women’s history in the United States

Paula Giddings. Interestingly, Giddings did not then hold a professional degree, but wrote – [[like Eleanor Flexner in the 1950s]] – from outside the academy. Nonetheless her Her work broke many new barriers. She identified a long tradition of feminist writing and activism among African American women, reaching back at least to the 1890s. She established the centrality of the issue of lynching to its emergence. She investigated the history of discrimination by white feminists of black feminists. She moved past heroic individuals to consider the larger social forces shaping the lives and consciousness of African American women. Perhaps most important, the end of slavery was the starting point of her history, not the end

So far I have been speaking exclusively about African American women’s history. But US historians now recognize that racial awareness also must involve