African American women are history makers. Here’s a list of must-reads!

Throughout Women’s History Month this year, the commemoration of 100 years of the 19th Amendment has been a central focus. Keynotes, panels, and pieces about the historic constitutional amendment, which effectively enfranchised white women while leaving most African American women and most people of color without access to the elective franchise, were in abundance.

The trailblazing work of Black women historians such as Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Martha Jones on suffrage challenges a purely celebratory approach to the history of woman suffrage. More generally, the field of African American women’s history intervenes in the broader narrative of American history to center those on the margins.

The field of African American women’s history has grown exponentially in the 21st century. This scholarship challenges narratives of the history of the United States in which Black women are not seen as formidable and consequential historical actors. African American women’s history offers groundbreaking work on subjects including but not limited to enslaved Black women and free women of color, anti-lynching and anti-rape activism, Black clubwomen, blues women, labor activism, pan-Africanism, the Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s, and Gay Liberation Movements, and popular culture. The breadth and depth of the field can’t be overstated. Despite the lack of widespread recognition, African American women’s history is fundamental to any meaningful examination of America’s past.

In honor of #WHM2020, I have compiled a non-exhaustive, “must-read” list of books authored by Black women in the 21st century about African American women’s history. Even with a focus on recent scholarship, narrowing this down to a handful of titles was nearly impossible given the range of incisive and innovative work in African American women’s history. This list contextualizes each of the books within the broader field. Ideally, this list will inspire folks to recalibrate or perhaps create their own women’s history reading lists that more fully incorporate the recent contributions of Black women historians. With the number of compelling titles in this rapidly growing field, #WHM2020 can be indefinitely extended.

A Black Women’s History of the United States, by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross

Comprehensive volumes are challenging: There will always be an event or a historical figure left out or not given sufficient attention. Pioneers of African American women’s history such as Darlene Clark Hine, Kathleen Thompson, and Paula Giddings built a strong foundation for exhaustive approaches to exploring the history of Black women in the United States. Berry and Gross’ new volume is an insightful, well-researched, teachable, and accessible accounting of this still-unfolding history. The range of Black women’s voices captured is astonishing. The authors don’t sacrifice depth for breadth.

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, by Stephanie M.H. Camp

Without question, the late Stephanie Camp was a force in African American women’s history. Closer to Freedom hones in on the quotidian experiences of enslaved Black women. Building on groundbreaking work on enslaved Black women by scholars such as Angela Davis and Deborah Gray White, Camp challenges us to reconsider how we think about resistance and how we recognize resistance to slavery beyond highly visible examples like slave revolts or individual stories of enslaved people running away.

Jesus, Jobs, and Justice: African American Women and Religion, by Bettye Collier-Thomas

To more fully grasp the history of Black women in the United States, it’s essential to examine their religious practices, institutions, and affiliations. In this meticulous and sweeping book, Collier-Thomas details the importance of religious faith, particularly Christianity, to African American women throughout U.S. history. For many African American women, their social and political activism has been and continues to be grounded in their religious faith. Alongside brilliant books like Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 and Ula Yvette Taylor’s The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam, which chronicle the importance of religious faith to African American women and their activism, Jesus, Jobs, and Justice refuses to let religion be an afterthought in the way we think about U.S. social and political activism.

Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and The Global Politics of Soul, by Tanisha C. Ford

One of the most exciting areas in African American women’s history is transnational and pan-African approaches to studying experiences of Black women throughout the African diaspora. Another continuously growing area in the field is the exploration of Black women’s fashion, beauty, and popular cultures. Ford combines both of these areas in her award-winning book on Black women’s style, politics, culture, and resistance in the mid-20th century. Using what she identifies as an “eclectic archive,” Ford provides a unique approach to studying Black women in the African diaspora as well as modern Black freedom struggles.

Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology, by Deirdre Cooper Owens

There’s been considerable coverage recently of the Black maternal mortality crisis. To contextualize this crisis, it’s important to look at the history of medical racism in the U.S. and its distinct and far-reaching effects on Black women. In Medical Bondage, Owens chronicles the exploitative and harmful ways medical practitioners have discussed, treated, and experimented with Black women. Pseudoscientific claims such as Black people being impervious to pain have residual effects on how Black women are treated within health care systems.

Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, by Crystal N. Feimster

Lynching is one of the more widely acknowledged forms of anti-Black violence. What often is left out of this conversation is the role rape played in maintaining white supremacy during the Jim Crow era. Southern Horrors delves into the experiences of African American women as victims of rape and lynching and the role of pro-lynching white women in the Jim Crow South. Feimster exposes the racial, sexual, and gender dynamics of a post-slavery, racially segregated society.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals, by Saidiya Hartman

Authored by a newly designated MacArthur genius, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is a bold and ambitious text focused on the daily lives of Black women, girls, and femmes in urban areas during the early 20th century. Grappling with the intimate and interior lives of historical subjects who are not often found in archives, Hartman affirms the importance of joy, pleasure, and quotidian attempts to resist oppressive realities. Hartman privileges the everyday experiences of those on the margins while creatively and convincingly imagining the more intimate details of her subjects’ lives.