Changes

African American Women’s History exploded onto the scene in the wake of second wave feminism. As the convergence of the Black Studies and Women’s Studies movements picked up steam, Black women challenged both. The subfield emerged and began to quickly rethink the experiences of enslavement, labor, the suffrage movement, and institution building. Their work produced the founding of the Association of Black Women Historians in 1979. Today, more and more scholarship is emerging demonstrating the roles that African American women continue to play in areas as vast as American institutional life and radical movements. Some of the pioneering works in these areas are constitute this list. This list begins with a work that provided the inspiration for those works which emerged near the end of the twentieth century.