Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves

Too Heavy a Load celebrates this centurys rich history of black women defending themselves, from Ida B. Wells to Anita Hill. Although most prominently a history of the century-long struggle against racism and male chauvinism, Deborah Gray White also movingly illuminates black womens painful struggle to hold their racial and gender identities intact while feeling the inexorable pull of the agendas of white women and black men. Finally, it tells the larger and lamentable story of how Americans began this century measuring racial progress by the status of black women but gradually came to focus on the status of black men-the masculinization of Americas racial consciousness. Writing with the same magisterial eye for historical detail as in her best-selling Arnt I a Woman, Deborah Gray White has given us a moving and definitive history of struggle and freedom.