Published in 1999
336 pages
17 hours and 29 minutes
Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Black Feminist Thought is the best known of the many published works that have made her one of the leading American thinkers of our day.
Collins was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1948. The only daughter of a factory worker and a secretary, Collins attended the Philadelphia public schools. After obtaining her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University in 1969, she continued on to earn a Master of Arts Degree in Teaching from Harvard University in 1970. From 1970 to 1976, she was a teacher and curriculum specialist at St Joseph Community School, among two others, in Boston. She continued on to become the Director of the Africana Center at Tufts University until 1980, after which she completed her doctorate in sociology back at Brandeis in 1984.
While earning her PhD, Collins worked as an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati beginning in 1982. In 1990, Collins published her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment. A revised tenth anniversary edition of the book was published in 2000, and subsequently translated into Korean in 2009. While working at Tufts, she married Roger L. Collins in the year 1977, a professor of education at the University of Cincinnati, with whom she has one daughter, Valerie L. Collins. In 1990, Collins was the recipient of the prestigious C. Wright Mills Award. She was later awarded the Jessie Bernard Award by the American Sociological Association in 1993. For her book Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism (Routledge, 2005), she was presented the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Book Award in 2007.
Collins is recognized as a social theorist, drawing from many intellectual traditions; her more than 40 articles and essays have been published in a wide range of fields, including philosophy, history, psychology, and most notably sociology. Moreover, Collins was the recipient of a Sydney Spivack Dissertation Support Award. The University of Cincinnati named Collins The Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology in 1996, making her the first ever African-American, and only the second woman, to hold this position. She received emeritus status in the Spring of 2005, and became a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. The University of Maryland named Collins a Distinguished University Professor in 2006. In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe.
What is this book about?
In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.
