Black Feminist Voices in Politics by Evelyn M. Simien (State University of New York Press, 2006)

Reviewed by Kimberly Springer, August 2006 

Historians mark phases in the evolution of women's history. Initially, feminist activist-scholars excavated women denied a place in the pantheon of great writers, artists and thinkers. Next, they compensated for this omission by adding women to traditional narratives. Finally, both textbooks and thinking at all levels of education were transformed by asking questions from a gendered perspective.

A similar stages argument applies to the social sciences and political science. These fields, desperately in need of women of color voices, are served well by Evelyn M. Simien's book Black Feminist Voices in Politics. It's tempting to only celebrate African-American women's resilience in spite of multiple types of oppression in the U.S. political system. We can also get mired in debates over social and cultural issues that seem to result in asking the same frustrating questions: where are the black leaders? Why don't black people vote in greater numbers? Simien wants us to ask different questions in order to tell a new story about black feminism and black political participation.

Each chapter of Simien's book begins with an examination of a particular black feminist intellectual. Profiles of anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett, suffragettes Sojourner Truth and Frances E.W. Harper, orator Maria Stewart, clubwoman Mary Church Terrell, and church activist Nannie H. Burroughs highlight how black women see race and gender at work in their personal and political lives. From this historical grounding, Simiens revisits previous major studies of black political life, the National Black Political Study (NBPS), 1993-1994 and the National Black Election Study (NBES), 1984-1988. She dissects the exclusion of issues and factors that might illuminate more clearly black women's place in U.S. political life. How might competing race or gender interests change prevailing perceptions of black women's acceptance of a generic feminism and black men's alleged rejection of feminism?

From the outset, though, it's unclear what Simiens is arguing against. Are there established myths about black feminism's impact on black political participation that she hopes to challenge? Or is it simply the failure to ask the right questions that drives Simien's analysis of public opinion polls? If the goal were the latter, this book, in terms of the stages of black feminist theory in political science, is firmly rooted in the realm of compensating for unasked empirical questions.

And while I do believe in her objective of connecting black feminist theorizing with empirical data, what about the lived experience to which Simien refers throughout her analysis? What, for example, were the current events that black women and men experienced during the time of the NBPS survey from December 1993 to February 1994 that account for her ultimate assertion that black feminist consciousness doesn't impact black political behavior?

Simien conducted a National Black Feminist Study (NBFS) in 2004-2005. Black Feminist Voices in Politics is the foundation for promising future work from the NBFS that is determined to transform how we think about black women as political actors and black feminism as a politically viable ideology.