REFLECTIONS ON THE EARLY CONTRIBUTIONS OF PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

Author(s): ELIZABETH HIGGINBOTHAM

Source: Gender and Society , February 2012, Vol. 26, No. 1 (February 2012), pp. 23-27
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23212235

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 REFLECTIONS ON THE EARLY
CONTRIBUTIONS OF
PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

ELIZABETH HIGGINBOTHAM
University of Delaware

It Collins,
is wonderful
but it isto be part task,
a difficult of this group
as her careerappraising the work
at the University of of Patricia Hill
Cincinnati spanned decades, and her position in the Department of Sociology
at the University of Maryland gives her new opportunities to work with
sociology graduate students to nurture another generation of scholars. At
this count, Patricia Hill Collins has too many publications to talk about in
detail. What can one say in a few thousand words about someone who has
been president of the American Sociological Association, published five
solo authored books, written groundbreaking articles for journals and edited
collections, and coedited the premier anthology Race, Class, and Gender,
which was trendsetting and, in its eighth edition, continues to lead the field.
Frankly, I was baffled about how to approach this task. Maxine Baca Zinn,
Joya Misra, and I shared some communication about how we might pro
ceed. It was Joya Misra who took the initiative and noted that she read Black
Feminist Thought (1990) in graduate school and planned to discuss how
Collins's scholarship shaped her research agenda and had an impact on her
cohort's sociological imagination and vision. Her approach pushed me to
think about how different cohorts have read Patricia Hili Collins's work, as
she has been publishing since the late 1980s, with students and scholars
coming to her work at various points in their own careers. My comments
reflect the influence of Patricia Hill Collins on an earlier cohort than Misra's,
but can inform a coherent appreciation of her contributions.
It would have been nice to have read Black Feminist Thought in gradu
ate school, but that was not the case when I attended Brandeis University
in the 1970s. Those of us who might have preceded Patricia Hill Collins
in graduate training and were fellow travelers in the early days of intersec
tional thinking have a different reading and I think we see her work from
a unique perspective because it enabled us to critique the interdisciplinary
field of women's studies.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 26 No. 1, February 2012 23-27
DOI: 10.1177/0891243211426723
© 2012 by The Author(s)

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 GENDER & SOCIETY / February 2012

Collins's early intersectional work, "Learning from the Outsider Within"

(1986) and Black Feminist Thought (1990), were important to Black
feminist scholars in our battle against essentialism in women's studies.
Coming out of graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we are
eager to contribute to this movement and think about how gender, along with
race, would aid our explorations into the lives of Black women. I know many
people chant the mantra from Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith's collection All the
Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black
Women's Studies (1982). In reality, there were many obstacles in the 1970s
and 1980s for those of us researching Black women. To quote Pat's essay
on "Black Public Intellectuals," according to the norms in Du Bois' days,
"One becomes an intellectual by ceasing to espouse particularistic causes,
identities, or special interests" (Collins 2005, 23). Even in the 1970s and
1980s, Black feminists were walking a thin line between particularism and
universality, given that most scholars did not see any broad significance
to the experiences of what most view as a deviant group. We were strug
gling about the very legitimacy of studying the lives and circumstances of
ourselves, our mothers, our sisters, and our foremothers. In that era, there
were costs for white scholars who studied men and women of color, but if
white people studied people of color it was more readily viewed as schol
arship than if people of color did.
In the early 1970s and into the 1980s, we might have been brave, but at
the same time many of us were isolated, some of us had trouble finding
academy positions, some of us had trouble getting published, some of us
faced barriers to tenure and promotion, and we faced a host of other obsta
cles because of how research on Black women was viewed as the time. In
my first academic position, people thought I was smart but wondered why
I worked on Black people and women. At best the climate was neutral, but
often it was hostile. I submitted a piece for Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith's
book and watched it languish as they searched for years to find a publisher
for that famous collection; meanwhile I noticed how other articles move
quickly toward publication. It was a chilling lesson in my early days in the
ivory tower. Deborah Gray White, in the preface of the 1999 edition of
Ar'n't I a Woman?, originally published in 1985, writes explicitly about
the difficulties Black scholars had with book manuscripts on Black women
in the 1980s, including hers as she kept rewriting and looking for a home
for it. Anne Firor Scott, who was reviewing recent scholarship on
women for an article, read Deborah's dissertation and told her publisher,
W. W. Norton, that they needed to publish it. Scott had the clout to take
such actions, but few of us had scholars who were opening the gates at that
time; most acted as gatekeepers of traditional academic scholarship.

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 Higginbotham / EARLY CONTRIBUTIONS OF PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

The terrain was difficult to navigate and what Collins's early work,
particularly Black Feminist Thought, did was to identify a standpoint and
how everyone's social location makes for a perspective that is connected
to a lived experience. Collins was uniquely positioned to do this work
because she was trained at Brandeis University, both as an undergraduate
and a doctoral student, with an education degree from one of those schools
in Cambridge in between. Brandeis was a theoretical powerhouse where
the sociology of knowledge is a lens of investigation. So Collins asked
critical questions about knowledge and the role of power in constructing
knowledge, and expanded the public definition of knowledge.
Patricia Hill Collins built on the work of other fellow travelers and
opened new doors that not only expanded our work but influenced younger
scholars. Many scholars engaged in empirical work to dispel myths about
Black women and their families, explore their employment experiences,
identify their contributions to community and politics, and uncover a his
tory that was really invisible. Many sought to make theoretical claims, but
this scholarship was seen as "particularistic" and viewed only in a vacuum.
It was disconnected from "real scholarship on women" which was the con
text for developing theory. Few white scholars recognized any social or
theoretical significance to claims by Black women scholars or other schol
ars of color. The findings about these groups were viewed as interesting
as cultural asides, but most often seen as deviant actions. If Black women
pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, stayed in school longer, delayed
childbearing until after marriage, and engaged in the right behaviors, their
lives would be like white women's. Because many of us were isolated in
colleges and universities around the nation, these were hard times and
challenging dominant thinking was not easy (Baca Zinn et al. 1986).
So Collins's work makes clear that Black women are positioned within
a matrix of domination that is about that material reality—not, as many
theories suggested, the failures of families, the legacy of enslavement, or
any of the many myths that had operated for decades, excusing America's
system of apartheid for the harm it caused the Black community. Collins
helped us see that we were outsiders within the ivory tower, if we were
lucky enough to actually get positions in major universities. Other Black
women came to see why their elite degrees got them only positions at
public institutions with demanding teaching responsibilities that created
difficulties in sustaining a research agenda. We could use that standpoint
to articulate our own positions on our fields and not just "dress for success"
and "follow orders" as the route to tenure and promotion. We used such
knowledge to develop our own voices, rather than heed the expectations
that we should work within white feminist theory and show how these

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 GENDER & SOCIETY/ February 2012

ideas also applied to Black women. We came to understand how we

were caught in the very matrix of domination, even if we had doctorates.
Controlling images of Black women as "Mammy" and "Jezebel" influenced
how many of our colleagues related to us: the expectations that we do all
the service work but remain silent with regard to major departmental poli
cies. Our attempts at innovations in many college and university arenas
were viewed as naive, often taken as evidence that we lacked the cultural
capital to succeed in these professional spaces. If we were to have an
impact in our institutions—and I note "if'— we had to present our posi
tions differently and make clear that we sought to open new doors and
champion new voices (Weber, Higginbotham, and Dill 1997). Collins's
words helped us understand how many students were acting out the
devalued status of Black women on us—behaviors that influenced teach
ing evaluations and the climate in our classrooms. We could see how
sexual harassment, even from Black men, was connected to a legacy and
continued media images that presented us as sexually available. Her
work was very much about us as Black women, including the tradition of
working for social justice. It helped us think about how to take up the
quest for justice in the very places that we worked.
I noted that Patricia Hill Collins stood on the shoulders of others because
when Black Feminist Thought was published in 1990, no other contempo
rary book drew as heavily on the new scholarship produced by Black
women scholars. Not only did Collins present the views of Maria W. Stewart,
Anne Julia Cooper, and a historical legacy of thinkers, artists, poets, authors
and blues singers from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, she was
reading the work of Black women who were her contemporaries doing
history, humanities, and social sciences. At that time, few people were
reading Brewer, Clarke, Dickerson, Dill, Dodson, Gilkes, Ladner, Murray,
Myers and many others who were pushing against the essentialist thinking
in women studies that did not provide a context of understanding women
of color. Perhaps her vision of the significance of that work, and placing
it within the context of a legacy of Black feminist thought, is part of what
enabled us to actually be brave. Of course, Collins went on to write addi
tional books that were groundbreaking in analyzing black sexual politics,
the shifting terrain of oppression in a postracial nation, and much else,
while consistently advocating for intellectual activism. She continues to
be active in interrogating the current discourse about color blindness and
pushing us to understand that oppression is still with us and we need to
enhance our theories to understand the current structure. I think her early
work was truly significant in helping other scholars combat the labels of
particularism, challenge the language of essentialism in women's studies,

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 Higginbotham / EARLY CONTRIBUTIONS OF PATRICIA HILL COLLINS

and move in ways to demonstrate that our scholarship has much to say
about the nature of social life in the United States and the world.

REFERENCES

Baca Zinn, Maxine, Lynn Weber Cannon, Elizabeth Higginbotham, an

Thornton Dill. 1986. The cost of exclusionary practices in women'
Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society 11: 290-303.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. Learning from the outsider within: The
significance of Black feminist thought. Social Problems 33 (6): 14-
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, cons
and the politics of empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2005. Black public intellectuals: From Du B
present. Contexts 4 (4): 22-21.
Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 1982. All
are white, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave: Black
studies. Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press.
Weber, Lynn, Elizabeth Higginbotham, and Bonnie Thornton D
Sisterhood as collaboration: Building the Center for Research on Wo
University of Memphis. In Feminist sociology: Life histories of a m
edited by Barbara Laslett and Barrie Thorne. New Brunswick, NJ:
University Press.
White, Deborah Gray. 1999. Ar'n't I a woman? Female slaves in the p
South. New York: W. W. Norton.

Elizabeth Higginbotham is a professor of Sociology at the University of

Delaware with joint appointments in Black American Studies and Women's
Studies. She is one of the founders of the Center for Research on Women at
the University of Memphis. The author of Too Much to Ask: Black Women
in the Era of Integration (University of North Carolina Press, 2001), she is
currently investigating Black professionals who desegregate workplaces.

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