Back to School with Beverly Guy-Sheftall

We caught up with Beverly Guy-Sheftall at her home in Atlanta, where she is director of the Women’s Resource and Research Center and is Anna Julia Cooper professor of women’s studies at Spelman College, which is one of the nation’s most distinguished historically black colleges and a leader in educating women since 1881. Beverly Guy-Sheftall joined Spelman’s faculty nine years after she arrived from Memphis as a 16-year-old freshman. On her first trip, Guy-Sheftall was accompanied by her mother, who thought her daughter was too young to make the trip alone. Guy-Sheftall has spent most of her academic life at this institution. (Below, see her tribute to her classmate Alice Walker.)

Sheftall is also the first professor to hold the Anna Julia Cooper Professorship, established through a grant from Camille and Bill Cosby. In 1981, she was the natural to help establish Spelman’s Women’s Research and Resource Center, founded to develop curriculum in women’s studies and to foster research by and about women of African descent. Three years ago, the center celebrated its 25th anniversary with a tribute to poet and activist Audre Lorde.

Guy-Sheftall persuades her students to become both activists and scholars. “Spelman is one of the few black, feminist spaces in higher education,” she told WVFC. Asked what distinguishes a black feminist space, Guy-Sheftall’s response is immediate: Black feminist scholarship, she said, accomplishes the essential. “It’s a space that considers race, class, gender and sexuality at the same time.” Asked about the efficacy of a curriculum on women and their history, Guy-Sheftall praises the work of academics whose work has focused on the lives and roles of women. In her view, the study of women has transformed historical scholarship.

Her own work has charted this path on numerous dimensions, including Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1990); Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities, edited with Johnettta Betsch Cole (Ballantine, 2003); Double Stitch: Black Women Write about Mothers and Daughters, edited with Patricia Bell-Scott (Beacon, 1991), and Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995).

Currently, Guy-Sheftall’s editing three books with others, and contemplating a fourth. Those projects include an anthology, Still Brave: Legendary Black Women on Race and Gender, forthcoming from The Feminist Press (www.feministpress.org); I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde, which Oxford University Press (www.oup.com) will publish in October; and an untitled volume on the race/gender debate which emerged from the recent U.S. presidential election, with essays by leading feminist activists and scholars. That other, still-contemplated project is her own political memoir, something she feels should be coming from more black women writers.

In her not-copious free time, Guy-Sheftall is reading Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, and trying to find the time —when she’s not teaching, writing or doing research— to see Meryl Streep in Julia + Julie.

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