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This article explores how black women who joined the Black Panther Party, one of the leading Black Power organizations in the 1960s and 70s, were empowered to challenge racism and sexism in society, in the Panthers, and in themselves. Using oral history and archival sources, it examines such issues as formal and informal leadership, state political repression, gendered guerilla imagery, and debates around child rearing and birth control to reveal how these women were able to shape the Panthers' organizational evolution, even as they struggled against misogyny. This article contributes to historical understanding of the Black Power movement from the bottom up.
In 1970, Frances Beale, founding member of the Women's Liberation Committee of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), bluntly observed that: "Since the advent of Black power, the Black male has exerted a more prominent leadership role in our struggle for justice in this country. He sees the system for what it really is for the most part, but where he rejects its values and mores on many issues, when it comes to women, he seems to take his guidelines from the pages of the Ladies' Home Journal."1 Beale identified the central paradox of the black liberation ideologies which undergirded the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s-their potential to challenge the status quo on white supremacy while reinforcing it on gender issues. Beale's provocative statement highlighted the fact that Black Power advocates' argument that the restoration of black manhood was central to opposing white supremacy dovetailed with mainstream policy prescriptions, such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan's influential 1965 report The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The notion of black male emasculation at the hands of superpowerful black women clearly shaped the context for the emergence of Black Power. As a result, the Black Power movement has been inextricably linked to "the belief in black male dominance" and the restoration of a manhood that was "separate from [and even antagonistic to] Black womanhood" in the scholarly literature and in the popular imagination.2 Despite the rich history contained in first-person accounts written by movement participants and the recent outpouring of books, essay collections, and journal articles on the Black Power movement, scholarly analysis of the nuances of black women's experiences in...