Evelyn M. Simien makes three major contributions in this book. First, and most important, she uses insights derived from a black feminist theory that is largely literary to inform hard, number-crunching empirical research. Black feminist theorists from Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth to Kimberlé Crenshaw and bell hooks are used to derive operational definitions and testable hypotheses. Those seeking unity in the discipline would do well to study this book.
Her second contribution, derived from the first, is to show that black feminism is something different from the additive combination of black race consciousness and feminism. As Simien puts it, “just because a citizen has a strong gender and race identity does not necessarily mean that person will recognize the unique situation faced by African American women” (p. 36). Conversely, black feminists may not identify with the women's movement because of a perception that it concerns itself only with the problems of white women.
Simien derives her own six-item scale of black feminist consciousness from questions included in the National Black Politics Study of 1993–94, supplemented with analysis of data from the National Black Election Study of 1984–88. Rather than asking separately about race and sex, these items asked whether race and sex discrimination were linked, whether black feminist groups help the black community, and whether black women should share in political and church leadership. Having derived this independent measure, Simien is able to conclude that black feminist consciousness is strongly correlated with race consciousness, but only weakly, if at all, with feminist consciousness. She contends that these “bolster the claim that items designed to tap feminist identification among white women are problematic because they yield a measurement of support for white feminism among black women—not black feminist consciousness” (pp. 50–51). She also concludes that support for black feminist consciousness is greater among black men than among black women—although additional analysis suggests that this may be more a matter of political correctness rather than of underlying beliefs (pp. 54–60).
Simien's third major contribution is the development and implementation of the National Black Feminist Study, a survey of 500 African Americans who were eligible to vote, conducted by telephone between November 2004 and January 2005. This brief survey makes it possible to measure change in several items from the National Black Political Study of 10 years earlier. She concludes that black feminist consciousness remains high among both men and women, and that such consciousness is now a stronger determinant of political activity—especially of voting—than it had been earlier.
Unfortunately, the last conclusion is not well-founded because of two methodological problems, one specific to this comparison and one much more fundamental. First, race consciousness is included among the determinants of black political behavior in Simien's analysis of the 1993–94 survey (p. 111), but omitted from the analysis of the 2004–5 survey (p. 149). Because race consciousness is strongly related to black feminist consciousness (p. 86), this omission itself may explain the greater apparent importance of black feminist consciousness in the latter study.
Simien's analysis suffers from a more basic flaw, as well. Most—and perhaps all—of her ordinal variables are coded as if the data were interval-level, and then analyzed with statistical procedures valid only for the latter. For example, urban residence was coded as 1 for those who said that they lived in a “large city,” 0.75 for those replying “suburb,” 0.5 for “small city,” 0.25 for “small town,” and 0 for rural (p. 80); the data are then analyzed by ordinary least squares regression (p. 83). Similarly illegitimate manipulations are performed on several other ordinal variables (pp. 104–5, 149–51). Unfortunately, this error renders a great many of Simien's tables invalid, and calls her conclusions into question, particularly those about the factors associated with black political participation. Because the raw data still exist, all is not lost. It is to be hoped that Simien will rerun her analyses using coding and statistics appropriate for ordinal data.
The book has some stylistic flaws. It is clumsily written and poorly edited. Contradictory statements are made, or the direction of a relationship is confused (see the discussion of the effects of single parenthood on liberalism, pp. 148–49). The book clearly began as a set of dissertation chapters, with Simien's 2004–5 survey discussed only in an epilogue, and some extraneous material has crept in unnoticed. For example, we find what must surely have been meant for a promotional flyer—“The transparent narrative style makes the survey data and empirical analysis accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students,” (p. 15)—in the middle of Chapter 1; an interesting but irrelevant analysis of the problems faced by black women faculty in teaching privileged white students (pp. 74–76); and a “conclusion”—that “Rather than earn the trust of nonelite civil servants through critical action and collective struggle, black intellectuals typically operate in isolation and confine themselves to the Ivory Tower”—that has no connection to any data or analysis elsewhere in the book. She is perhaps too confident that high support for her measure of black feminist consciousness proves “that black feminist intellectuals have been successful at disseminating their beliefs about the matrix of domination” (p. 144). Finally, she does not seem to be aware that there might be some tension between her claim that men are slightly more supportive of black feminism than women (p. 145) and her insistence that black women's leadership is badly needed because “black patriarchy exists today” (p. 154).
Despite these serious flaws, I recommend the book to anyone interested in the politics of race and gender in America today. Simien's (flawed) statistical analyses have the potential to be improved; her integration of normative theory with quantitative analysis is pathbreaking; and her operational definition of black feminist consciousness will prove to be of great use to scholars.
