Black Womanist Leadership

Introduction Looking to the Motherline A nation is not conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground. —Lakota proverb, Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman THE VALUE OF THE MOTHERLINE and its wisdom are inestimable. According to Edelman (1994) and Lowinsky (1992), “without knowledge of her own experiences and their relationship to her mothers,” a daughter is snipped from the female cord that connects the generations of women in her family, the feminine line of descent known as the “Motherline.”A woman achieves her psychic connection to generations of feminine wisdom through hearing her mother’s and her grand- mother’s narratives about women’s physical, psychological, and historical changes—bleeding, birthing, suckling, aging, and dying. According to Lowinsky:“When a woman today comes to understand her life story as a story from the Motherline, she gains female authority in a number of ways that help her ...[reclaim]herfemale perspective, from which to consider how men are similar and how they are different” (Lowinsky, 1992, p. 13). Lowinsky theorizes the ways women gain “female authority” when they understand their life stories in the context of the Motherline: the reclamation of our carnal body knowledge, particularly its “blood mys- teries and their power”; the attainment of a life cycle perspective that 1 ©2011 State University of New York Press, Albany 2 KING AND FERGUSON creates a compassionate gaze at our current situation and the discovery of our female roots and their parallel struggles; and development into connection with the archetypal mother and the accompanying ancient world view and its wisdom. From this world view, a woman learns that the body and soul are unified, that all of life is interrelated, and from this way of knowing women soften into the perspective that life changes, babies grow, people age and die, there is a cycle to all of life. Finally, Lowinsky tells us that the Motherline gives women grounding as they come to terms with the new options now open to us as women. In other words, Motherline stories ground women in a gender, a family, and a feminine history. By centering this investigation on the transmission of leadership knowledge through the Motherline, we help to define the contours of black womanist knowledge. In this way we counter the dominant culture’s pattern of imprinting its values, experiences, and interpretations of maternal strivings on the symbiosis of the African American mother-daughter dyad. Our efforts support the naming of our own reality(ies) and refute external sources of labeling and constructing what constitutes leadership for us. In naming our own ways of passing on leadership we engage in the African American tradition of resistance, empowerment, and what Parker (2005, pp. 130–32) describes as transformation that dislodges, disrupts, and diverges from societal conceptions of “female only” leadership. STEPPING UP TO THE COUNTERNARRATIVE: LOOSENING THE UNTOLD STORY There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you. —Zora Neale Hurston The value of story in women’s lives is a cultural anchor.1 Scholars such as Johnetta Betsch Cole and Beverly Guy-Sheftall (2003) suggest that the stories women tell bring us into the deep structure of the culture and the texture and quality of daily life. They also widen the circle of knowledge, spur change, and aid other women in reframing the contours and rough edges of their lives. In this anthology, we choose to have black women tell us stories about the Motherline as a means of ©2011 State University of New York Press, Albany INTRODUCTION 3 entering this cultural realm. Bettina Aptheker’s explanation of the cen- tral role of story in women’s lives helps us see why story as the medium for learning about women’s lives is so crucial. She writes: “Women use stories in their everyday lives, and especially as a way of doing emo- tional work . [S]ome have been stitched into quilts or planted in gar- dens or painted or sculpted or written in letters and journals . [W]omen’s stories evoke distinct meanings, distinct special and tempo- ral arrangements. They have been crafted out of the artifacts of daily life, beckoning us to see” (Aptheker, 1989, pp. 44–45). In the case of this book, the importance of stories is contradictory. On the one hand, there is a need to hear women speak in their own voices so that we are invited into the ways women use language and experience to shape meanings on their own terms. On the other hand, particularly when one looks at two vast subjects such as motherwork and leadership, there is the risk of revealing a system of knowledge designed to preserve black women’s lives and role in liberating the race. For this reason, such a tradition was intentionally kept “close to the vest” and behind the veil of black women’s double consciousness. Double consciousness, first conceptualized by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folks is the ability of marginalized groups to sustain a consciousness of both how they perceive themselves and how the dominant group perceives them. For black women, it was imperative that they know and understand the dominant white cultural group, rather than “be known” by dominant others. Just as it behooves the oppressed to cultivate stratagems unknown to the power elite, open access to black women’s leadership knowledge would undermine their capabili- ties for maintaining inviolable boundaries of spirit and pragmatic boundaries of action so necessary to personal and social uplift. We advocate a selective relinquishing of our former vigilance in favor of a deliberate unveiling in our own time and space, with our own methods, and in our own voice. Black women need to articulate and claim this knowledge to create a strong imprint of the collective knowledge that structures our cultural context. We need to be able to name, legit- imize and hold up our own paradigms of cultural meaning in the light of day. Perhaps this is why Patricia Bell Scott (1994) ©2011 State University of New York Press, Albany 4 KING AND FERGUSON says that Black women write “about” and “for” their lives . and says that “personal writing is/has always been a dangerous activity because it: “Allows us the freedom to defy culturally imposed negative identities . and has offered avenues for resistance and recreation.” (pp. 17–18) In addition, there is much historical precedent for black women intellectuals—particularly those we now frame as black feminist intellectuals—to give voice to social issues, particularly those pertinent to black life and culture, and to the isms arising from the social hierar- chies of power (Cole and Guy-Sheftall, 2003; Guy-Sheftall, 1995). Black women intellectuals from the 1800s to the present gave voice to some of the most highly contested issues of their time and used the power of the pen, including personal narrative, to take on and engage in psychosocial resistance and to effect change. Given the geophysical dispersion we are now subject to in the aftermath of urban migration, integration, urban renewal, gentrification, and the many other sources and forms of displacement we have been subjected to (e.g., Hurricane Katrina, mass corporate lay-offs, predatory lending), we now need to create sites for telling the stories that keep the fabric of African Amer- ican culture whole. In the case of mother-daughter leadership transmission, black women need to reconnect to the Motherline and seek the stories of leadership and then tell these stories to clarify and empower ourselves with common knowledge of our own leadership narrative and how knowledge of leadership was handed down to us.To affirm this knowledge dismantles the limits that patriarchy would place on us. To not have these stories consciously available to us structures a subtle form of subjugation that leaves us no tools for our own defense or for our own redefinition. We need the shared knowledge that we have participated in the human project of leadership.We need the language for structur- ing the meaning of our own leadership capacities, skills, and approaches. We need the imagination of the sheroes that have gone before us, including both those epic historical figures and those close to home in the bodies of our own mothers and othermothers.This work seeks to recast the privileged notion of leadership (Komives and Wagner ©2011 State University of New York Press, Albany INTRODUCTION 5 et al., 2009, McKenzie, 2001) as one that resides in our own lived experience and as one that emanates from our own Motherline herstories. Ain’t I a Leader? Barriers to Laying Claim to Leadership In constantly meeting the demands for survival and fending off the noxious stimuli of discrimination it is altogether possible for black women to not be cognizant of their own performance as leaders.2 As a case in point, many of the women writers who submitted works to be considered for this anthology, including those whose works were selected—did not see themselves as leaders. Many of the women called us by phone, some more than once, to share their ideas for the paper they would like to write. Following the majority of these phone calls or queries was the refrain:“So is my idea related to leadership?” After we reassured potential contributors that their ideas were exactly the kind of narrative we hoped to receive, we found that there was still another level of uncertainty to address. Many of the women would then share with us their doubts about the terminology of leadership itself. Commonly we heard them say things such as: “I know I’ve achieved a number of things in my life, and I know that my othermothers prepared me well to achieve those things, but I never actually think of myself as a leader.”When we explored this conundrum further with them by pointing to some of the things they currently were doing or had done and asking whether they felt this was leadership, they would laughingly affirm that indeed it was! Some would even discover the incongruence between their willingness to use the labels of leader and leadership when speaking of their mothers and othermothers or their colleagues—but not themselves.

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