My entry into Black women’s history was unexpected but agreeable. In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical Encycl

admin2019-02-25  28

问题
    My entry into Black women’s history was unexpected but agreeable. In the preface to Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia , I recount the story of exactly how Shirley Herd(who, in addition to teaching in the local school system, was also president of the Indianapolis chapter of the National Council of Negro Women)successfully provoked me into changing my research and writing focus. Although I dedicate this volume to her and to her best friend, fellow club woman and retired primary school teacher Virtea Downey, I still blush at the fact that I went to graduate school to become a historian in order to contribute to the Black Struggle for social justice and yet met her request to write a history of Black women in Indiana with reluctance. I had never even thought about Black women as historical subjects with their own relations to a state’s history, and I thought her invitation and phone call extraordinarily intrusive. Only later did I concede how straightforward and reasonable had been her request to redress a historical o-mission. Black women were conspicuous by their absence. None of the social studies texts or state histories that Herd and Downey had used to teach their students made mention of the contributions of Black women. Since historians had left them out, Herd reasoned, only a "real" historian could put them in, and since I was the only tenured Black woman historian in the state of Indiana at that time, the task was mine.
    Herd rejected my reservations and completely ignored my admonitions that she could not call up a historian and order a book the way you drive up to a fast-food restaurant and order a hamburger. In spite of my assertions of ignorance about the history of Black women in Indiana and my confession of having never studied the subject in any history course or examined any manuscript sources pertaining to their lives, Herd persevered. Black women, as historical subjects and agents, were as invisible to me as they had been to school textbook writers.

    Undaunted by my response, Herd demanded that I connect(thankfully without perfect symmetry)my biology and autobiography, my race and gender, my being a Black woman, to my skill as a historian, and write for her and for the local chapter members of the National Council a history of Black women in Indiana. I relented and wrote the book, When the Truth Is Told: Black Women’s Culture and Community in Indiana, 1875 - 1950, as requested. In the process, I was both humbled and astounded by the array of rich primary source materials Herd, and the other club women had spent two years collecting. There were diaries, club notes, church souvenir booklets, photographs, club minutes, birth, death, and marriage certificates, letters, and handwritten county and local histories. Collectively this material revealed a universe 1 never knew existed in spite of having lived with Black women all of my life ... and being one myself. Or perhaps more accurately, I knew a universe of Black women existed. I simply had not envisioned its historical meaning.
The primary purpose of the passage is to show how the author______.

选项 A、discovered Black women’s history when she was in graduate school
B、became a historian to help Black people in America achieve social justice
C、developed her research skills by undertaking a challenging project
D、came to view Black women as a worthy subject for historical analysis

答案D

解析 这篇文章主要介绍了作者开始对黑人女性历史进行研究的背景。作者表明自己刚开始并不认为这是一个值得研究的话题,但同是一名黑人女性的Herd却一再要求。最终作者勉强同意了,在写作过程中Herd和其他黑人女性搜集到大量资料,而自己最终也意识到黑人女性在历史上所发挥的重要作用。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/3t8K777K
0

最新回复(0)