Nation Women Negotiating Islam

Moving Beyond Boundaries in the Twentieth Century

By C. S’thembile West

Nation Women Negotiating Islam highlights that Black women modeled diverse ways of agency and executing their roles in the nation-building project of the Nation of Islam. Informants candidly discussed their roles as women who were members of the Nation family between 1955 and 2000. In their personal and collective struggles to maintain a revolutionary consciousness in their homes and community, Nation women demonstrated that women need not be and were not totally submissive to Black men, as they assumed respectable status as wife or mother.

C. S’thembile West highlights that activism need not exclude motherhood or marriage and that the home constituted a “house of resistance,” as described in Angela Davis’ seminal 1971 article “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.” In sum, the role of Black women as mothers, teachers, and custodians of freedom consciousness had and has a significant impact on individual households and communities.

Nation Women Negotiating Islam illuminates the intricate threads that connect Nation women as a critical component of the continuum of Black women’s activism, despite disparate strategies.

Untold stories of women in the social project of the Nation of Islam reveals an activism that sought to engage self-agency, despite classist, patriarchal, and sexist underpinnings.

Lexington Books

May 2023

234 pages

Part of the Africana Experience and Critical Leadership Studies series

Hardback

978 1 7936 4237 0 eBook

978 1 7936 4238 7

Social Science • Ethnic Studies / African Studies