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Florynce Kennedy & Black Feminism Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: The Life of a Black Feminist Radical By Sherie M. Randolph The University of North Carolina Press, 2015, 328 pages, $30 hardcover.
FLORYNCE KENNEDY (1916-2000) is probably most commonly remembered for her distinctive appearance - sporting one of her many cowboy hats and more than one political button - and her profane, humorous, and witty manner of speaking. About reproductive justice, for example, Flo coined the memorable line,"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament." (175)
Sherie M. Randolph's stimulating and very readable Florynce "Flo" Kennedy: the Ufe of a Black Feminist Radical persuasively shows that Flo's intellectual and political significance ran much deeper than this humor. At the same time, she offers an insightful analysis of the way in which Flo effectively used her humor for political effect.
Randolph is an associate professor of History at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In this book, the first biography of Kennedy, Randolph makes a substantial addition to the history of 20th-century social movements: Black Power, feminism, civil rights, the New Left. (See Sherie M. Randolph's "The Lasting Legacy of Florynce Kennedy, Black Feminist Fighter," ATC 152, https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3272.)
Randolph argues that "the boundaries around movements were far more porous than scholars assumed" and that "the connections that Kennedy forged between Black Power advocates and emerging white feminists provided feminists with a vocabulary for describing racial and gender oppression and fueled the creation of broad-based antiracist alliances." (2, 5)
Thus, Randolph enriches and deepens our understanding of what has become a widely acknowledged critique of mainstream feminism after World War II, that white-dominated feminist organizations failed to address the needs of women of color, undermining their very ability to create a truly liberatory and inclusive movement.
Randolph shows, however, that "black women were present at the creation of post-war feminist movements and articulated a black feminist agenda based on their position as AfricanAmerican women who experienced sexist and racist discrimination in forms that could not be pulled apart and fought separately." (2)
Randolph draws on extensive research, including Kennedy's papers, archives and essays, videos from "The Flo Kennedy Show," and dozens of interviews with Kennedy's sisters and significant figures in 20th-century feminism and the Black Power Movement, from...