We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History

A sweeping panorama of black women's experience throughout history and across classes and continents

This book was put together to reclaim, and to create heightened awareness about, individuals, contributions, and struggles that have made African-American survival and progress possible. We cannot accurately comprehend either our hidden potential or the full range of problems that besiege us until we know about the successful struggles that generations of foremothers waged against virtually insurmountable obstacles. We can, and will, chart a coherent future and win essential opportunities with a clear understanding of the past in all its pain and glory.

Here, in a single volume, is a sweeping panorama of black women's experience throughout history and across classes and continents. Containing over 30 crucial essays by the most influential and prominent scholars in the field, including Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Linda Gordon, and Nell Irvin Painter, We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible is a comprehensive assessment of black women's lives.

The book is divided into six sections: theory; Africa; the Caribbean and Canada; 18th-century United States; 19th-century United States; and 20th-century United States. A remarkably diverse range of topics are covered, with chapters on such subjects as working-class consciousness among Afro-American women; the impact of slavery on family structure; black women missionaries in South Africa; slavery, sharecropping, and sexual inequality; black women during the American Revolution; imprisoned black women in the American West; women's welfare activism; SNCC and black women's activism; and property-owning free African-American women in the 19th-century South.

Author: Darlene Clark Hine
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 04/01/1995
Pages: 618
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 2.40lbs
Size: 9.80h x 6.94w x 1.52d
ISBN: 9780926019812

Review Citation(s):
School Library Journal 11/01/1995 pg. 141

About the Author
Hine, Darlene Clark: - Darlene Clark Hine is John A. Hannah Professor of American History at Michigan State University and editor of the award- winning Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia.King, Wilma: -

Wilma King is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University and the author of two forthcoming books, Africa's Progeny-America's Slaves: Children and Youth in Bondage in the Nineteenth-Century South and From Uncle Tom's Cabin to the Onset of the Civil War (1851-1861).
Linda Reed is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston, where she is also director of the African-American Studies Program. She is currently working on a biography of Fa

Reed, Linda: - Linda Reed is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston, where she is also director of the African-American Studies Program. She is currently working on a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer.