provided the conceptual framework for moving women of color from the margins of women's studies to the center and provided the catalyst for initiatives to incorporate "minority women's studies" into core curricula in diverse academic settings.

The first critical publication in this newly emerging field was a collection of works by and about black women, which Toni Cade (Bambara) edited in 1970. Cade's The Black Woman was important in the development of women's studies, as was Kate Millett's pioneering and more celebrated Sexual Politics, though Cade's work has rarely been seen in this context by white feminists. The Black Woman was significant because of the value it attached to hearing the distinct voices of black women, arguing that their experiences were different from both black men and white women. Cade's work preceded by two years Gerda Lerner's 1972 documentary history Black Women in White America, which is often erroneously cited as having ushered in black women's studies. Another pioneering work neglected by early feminist historians was Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Sharon Harley's 1978 anthology, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images. Similarly, the groundbreaking work of La Frances Rodgers-Rose and Filomina Chioma Steady, both of whom edited the first social science anthologies on black women, went largely unnoticed by feminist social scientists. These early black women scholars paved the way for bell hooks, Paula Giddings, Bonnie Dill, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rose Brewer, and Patricia Hill-Collins, all of whom are now more visible to the white feminist academic community.

Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith defined black women's studies, traced its development, and provided a rationale for its existence in their 1982 foundational publication, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave:

Women's studies courses...focused almost exclusively upon the lives of white women. Black studies, which was much too often male dominated, also ignored black women....Because of white women's racism and black men's sexism, there was no room in either area for a serious consideration of the lives of black women. And even when they have considered black women, white women have not had the capacity to analyze racial politics and black culture, and black men have remained blind or resistant to the implications of sexual politics in black women's lives.

It is important to understand the context in which the first interdisciplinary anthology in black women's studies emerged and its implications for curriculum and societal reform. The most noteworthy developments in black women's studies (though this designation was not in use at the time) came from a relatively small group of women scholars who had been teaching and doing research on black women for at least 20 years, though they would be