Word: womanned
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...first step has been to demythologize the images of Black Macho manhood and super-womanhood. Black Macho starts with the identification of the black male as a helpless cripple, who stands idly by while his woman totes laundry and cleans kitchens to feed his children; she gets raped or seduced by the white man, and generally perverts the normal family structure to encourage her dominance. Gradually his rage grows, he longs to assert his control over himself, his woman and his race; finally, he explodes. But when he does it is in terms of spontaneous and largely ineffect ive outbursts...
...Black Macho requires one crucial element, and it is this phenomenon which angers the author most: in the hurly-burly of the 60's, when redefinition and reevaluation was one's only purpose, when the black bourgeoisie became honorary Ashantis, when every man was a prince and every woman Nefertiti, it finally dawned on someone that the black woman was at the root of black people's problems. And that usurping her was the key to solving them...
Somewhere, it seems everywhere, it was decided that because of slavery, racism, whatever, black women had become castrating machines who lived to put their man down while they strove only to pull themselves up. At the same time, the black woman, less of a women in that she is less feminine' and helpless...is really more of a woman in that she is the embodiment of Mother Earth, the quintessential mother with infinite sexual, life-giving, and nurturing reserves. In other words, she is a superwoman...
...ever noticed the contradictions of the two sides of the myth--why a woman who is Mother Earth would willfully castrate her sons, and why a pillar of strength would allow herself to be an instrument of degradation--is the subject of another 200-page treatise. Suffice it to say that the image has remained unquestioned even, as Wallace points out, by the occasional black woman writer or sociologist. Not only is the image inaccurate, according to the author, it is lethal...
Black women have been and remain the most economically vulnerable group, and have benefitted least from Great Society evangelism which focused mainly on expanding opportunities for black men. The assumption was that increasing benefits for the black man's opportunities would somehow trickle over to the black woman, but no provision for or assurance of this was ever legislated. Black women have remained in lower level clerical and domestic jobs, and have continued to need more education than any other group to maintain even substandard employment rates...