Reviews for The Black Woman: An Anthology

The average rating for The Black Woman: An Anthology based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-12-10 00:00:00 Denver Love I found this book of all places at Walmart. Published in 1970, The Black Woman is an anthology of poetry, short stories, but mainly essays that are still relevant today, all written by African-American women. The material in this book was published in various magazines and journals during the late 1960s. Reading this book I saw how so little has really changed in the mindset of Americans both black and white. The essays which are the majority talk about the conflict between black men and women but expressed that there should be unity and love between the sexes so they could both navigate and finally triumph over America's racial system. There is no "I don't need a man" attitude here or "I'm a strong black woman" repeated over and over which are the phrases so repetitious with many young African-American women. White middle class feminism is not seen as a model for black women. The black woman had her own issues and needed her own blue printed for uniting and reconciling with her man to become a loved and equal partner. These essays and stories of personal experiences also talk about the nature and history of racism in the American mindset, comparisons and contrasts of Dr. King and Malcolm X, The Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism, our African heritage, black parenting, colorism or black self-hatred over hair texture and skin shade, the phenomenon of the black man and the white woman and the true meaning of it, the American school system, the urban black and bourgeois black, American imperialism, and there is a letter of a black woman written to her sisters over in Vietnam suffering in that war, along with much more all ending in an essay about the movie The Battle of Algiers and how if blacks were not so isolated geographically, fragmented, and had more a profound religious faith like the Muslims of Algeria had we might would be able to free ourselves from the tyranny of racism. The essays, articles, and blog posts I often see on the same subjects now over 40 years later point out and complain of the same problems expressed in this anthology, but a number of the writers in The Black Woman provided solutions. This is a beautifully written and intellectual volume on so many levels. At the heart of this book there is a great optimism that black people in America would survive and break their mental and physical bonds. Since I also write, reading The Black Woman made me feel proud that once we had black women writers who didn't focus on celebrity and the banal in their writings like many do now, but we once had so much potential. I feel much profound sadness because we somehow lost and turned our backs on our own possibilities. What might have been...

Review # 2 was written on 2014-01-12 00:00:00 John Griffin I was 16 years and had just arrived from Puerto Rico, when my uncle had a visitor. A very charismatic young black woman, who was living with an artist painter. Her name was Joanne Clark. My uncle introduced me and was proud to tell me that Joan had just published a chapter on motherhood in a compilation about Black Women. The woman on the cover of the book had a large smooth afro and so did Joanne Clark. The afro look was at the edge of everything. It was Hip, cool, radical, of self realization and freedom. The chapter on motherhood in this book, was one of the first reading I did in the english language upon arriving from Puerto Rico. I remember that I had to use a dictionary, and I read slow. This book gave me a cultural panorama not only of black women, but of the sisterhood of women in general or in a Universal way; the only way I knew at that tender age. Meeting the author was paramount in the development of my own artistic ways. I was lost and without advise about the future, all I knew was that I loved Art, sculpture and painting in particularly. A few years passed and I was frustrated in some computer class, trying to make a career to make a living, when I ran into the author again. With one big supportive smile, she told me that I was on the wrong track and that I had to return to painting. I did and forty years after that is what i still do. I am proud of this book, needless to say....