Feminist Bestsellers: A Digital History of 1970s Feminism

Academics have long recognized 1970 as a signal moment in feminism's history. In the US, it has been labeled "Feminism's Pivotal Year" when a "wave of press attention" moved women's liberation into the mainstream."1 Histories of Black feminism also date "the beginning of a clearly defined Black women's liberation movement" to 1970.2 In Britain and Australia, the year serves as the origin point of the women's movement.3 The year 1970, however, functions as more than a temporal marker. As Lisa Disch noted in a special issue devoted to 1970s feminisms, the year, conceived "as an adjective rather than an epoch," connotes an ideological position: "politically naive, . . . essentialist in its aspiration toward (straight, white, middle-class) 'sisterhood' and unselfconsciously exclusionary."4

From the vantage point of fifty years later, this essay offers a historiographical intervention into 1970s feminism through computational text analysis of six bestsellers from the first year of the decade.5 Today these storied texts are among the most read and taught works of feminism. Inclusion among considerations of "the books that made us feminists" offers still another indication of their canonical status, yet scholars have tended to discuss some of these titles more than others, reflecting deeply-seated historiographical viewpoints about feminism during the 1970s.6 By employing a new methodology to analyze these texts, we hope to unsettle conventional scholarly conclusions about them. After an overview of the six books, we provide a brief review of scholarship about 1970s feminism and introduce our approach drawn from the digital humanities.

The press tended to treat these texts as representative of the same phenomenon, the emerging feminist movement.7 However, they encountered varying levels of critical and commercial successes. In July of 1970, a dissertation by a doctoral candidate in literature at Columbia University became an overnight bestseller.8 Kate Millett's Sexual Politics: A Surprising Examination of Society's Most Arbitrary Folly, presented the "sexual mythos of our era ... which must be explored if any radical social change is to come."9 The next month, British novelist Eva Figes's Patriarchal Attitudes, addressing "the factors which have helped place women in subservient roles in most societies," received a more modest reception and was all but eclipsed by The Female Eunuch in September."10 Australian Germaine Greer's text described "the castration of women . . . carried out in terms of a masculine-feminine polarity."11 It appeared just as Sexual Politics entered the New York Times bestseller list, a feat it would equal and then surpass by attaining the number one spot.12 Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution decried "the division of society into two distinct biological classes for procreative reproduction and the struggles of these classes with one another."13 By the time it appeared in print in October, the author had withdrawn from public life, and the book never attained the sales success of Millett's or Greer's.14

In addition to these four monographs, two influential anthologies also made their debuts in 1970. Toni Cade Bambara conceived of The Black Woman: An Anthology as a mass-market paperback; the smaller, cheaply produced editions available at many retail outlets for around a dollar.15 Cade prioritized access over the prestige of hardback to get the "collection of poems, stories, essays . . .[that] reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary Black woman in this country" into as many hands as possible, proving that a market for Black women's writing existed.16 She succeeded. The Black Woman had a run of at least 200,000, going to a second printing within a month of its August 1970 publication.17 Similarly, to increase access, Robin Morgan negotiated a simultaneous hardback and paperback release in September of 1970 for Sisterhood is Powerful: Writings from Women's Liberation, "a sort of introduction to the movement . . . but told in our own words."18

In contemporary scholarship, descriptions like "classics of 1970s feminism" provide a convenient shorthand for referring to these foundational works. Yet the term "1970s feminism" is a scholarly invention. As Clare Hemmings persuasively demonstrates, this periodization creates lasting historiographical narratives. Whether positioned as the good old days or the backwards past, invocations of 1970s feminism rely on sweeping generalizations which invariably occlude complexities.19 Hemmings' conclusion that narratives of 1970s feminism erase women of color has particular relevance for this study.

Other scholars anticipated Hemings's description of this phenomenon. Janet R. Jakobsen observes that "repeated reference to the 1980s as the beginning of diversity produces a number of narrative implications," pointing specifically to the erasure of The Black Woman's significance.20 Chela Sandoval, discussing "1970s feminist theory," documents the ways "hegemonic feminism of the 1980s" appropriated women of color's theorizing.21 Many of these scholars note that the usage of temporal markers plays into these narrativizing tendencies. Lisa Marie Hogeland, for example, recognizes the exclusion of "enormous and important contributions of women of color in the 1970s."22 Astrid Henry similarly concludes that wave metaphors "enable younger feminists to present their new wave as more progressive and inclusive."23

Subsequent scholars have amplified Hemmings' conclusion. Victoria Browne critiques the linear, teleological, and totalizing models of feminist history."24 Among the blockbusters of 1970 considered in this article, she focuses on Firestone and Millett. Activist-centered studies have complicated this version of feminism's history, challenging the notion that a hegemonic 1970s feminism existed outside academia. Kristen Hogan's oral history interviews with participants in the feminist bookstore movement did not recall "1970s feminism as straight and white."25 Maria Cotera notes that by focusing on academics, histories of 1970s feminism create a "lost generation" of Chicana feminism that, like Black feminism, emerged and developed not outside the academy but alongside it.26 Teresse Jonsson's analysis of accounts by British women's liberationists illustrates how "anti-racist critiques which were made in the past (and continue to be made) must be erased from the narrative" to support dominant periodizations of 1970s feminism.27 Jennifer Nash's recent work points out that historical narratives of 1970s feminism inevitably reduce Black feminism to two functions: disciplining feminism or saving it.28 As Kathi Weeks has suggested, however, "standard critiques of 1970s feminism" have settled into "orthodoxies of their own."29 She postulates that feminism's histories require temporalities that remake the past rather than merely remembering it.

Our goal is precisely that — to remake histories of 1970s feminism by emphasizing the signal year and the importance of Bambara's text in relation to more frequently recognized feminist literature from this era.30 As Benita Roth notes, The Black Woman "is rarely treated by scholars as a product of feminist social movement activism," and, as we illustrate below, it rarely receives the same acknowledgment in broader discussions of the achievements of feminists.31

Table 1: Corpus overview.

	Titles	word count
feminist corpus	6	771,403
women corpus	142	10,450,760
sample corpus	300	34,109,453
Sisterhood is Powerful		204,160
Sexual Politics		191,566
The Female Eunuch		122,145
The Black Woman		99,156
The Dialectic of Sex		84,678
Patriarchal Attitudes		69,698

Our method for analyzing feminist bestsellers from 1970 draws on the digital humanities. This essay is not the first to apply such an approach to bestsellers, but our goal is not to reveal the core features of such works. Instead, we answer specific historical questions using a small, albeit highly influential, set of nonfiction feminist bestsellers. Small corpora are unusual in the digital humanities, but in this case, the research question makes them appropriate. The corpus of feminist bestsellers is juxtaposed again two contemporaneous reference corpora: a sample of general nonfiction and a corpus of nonfiction writing about women drawn from the HathiTrust (Table 1).32 This database contained a potential pool of over 40,000 English-language books published in 1970. Further limiting this list to titles put out by the six large publishers of the era and their subsidiaries resulted in just over 1,500 works.33 We hand eliminated any book that appeared to be fictional or about women based on its title, resulting in a potential pool of 1,023 books, of which 300 were sampled. We label this the sample corpus. Any title that appeared to be writing about women was reserved for the second corpus, referred to as the women corpus.

We then derive the following information about the corpora using the HathiTrust Data Capsule.34 For named entity recognition, we used the 3-class model of Stanford NER to generate the labels.35 To assist the analysis process, we used two Python scripts. Results for n-gram frequencies, lists of keywords, and collocates of specific interested words, those selected by the researcher, used in this paper were produced with AntConc in the HathiTrust Data Capsule.36 Tokens are separated by space. Keyness is measured by log-likelihood ratio.37 Collocation analysis focuses on selected interested words (social, change, marriage, family, love, political, and revolution), and collocates are defined as words that co-occur within a 10-word context window (five to the left of the word, and five to the right), and those with higher association strengths, measured by mutual information, are especially considered.38

The following analysis relies on two comparisons of the corpora. Each of the three corpora is compared to the other two. This analysis relies solely on results produced in the HathiTrust Research Capsule and the results offer the broadest comparison among the texts, helping to contextualize feminist authors' arguments against contemporary concerns. To tease out what distinguishes feminist texts' treatment of women from other works of 1970, interested terms from the feminist corpus are compared individually to their presence in the other two corpora, as in the feminist corpus to the women corpus or the feminist corpus to the sample corpus. These calculations were performed manually using the contingency tables produced in the HathiTrust Data Capsule.39 Results include log ratios, a simple measurement that allows normalized usages of individual words to be compared across the corpora.40

While computational analysis in the humanities is often justified by the large number of texts, we use the method here for other reasons. This approach may circumvent the tendency to see only those text features that conform to existing historiographical assumptions. Computational analysis does things quite efficiently that the human mind cannot. In this case, computer software calculated mathematical relationships between words. While one could feasibly count the number of times a name appears, computational text analysis does more than count. Collocation strength, for example — the likelihood of words to follow particular patterns of association — would be quite complicated to determine manually.

The use of the data capsule in the HathiTrust offers both benefits and limitations. The process of non-consumptive text analysis means that the entire texts are not made available for researchers to download to their machines, and instead they are asked to implement their own analysis in a remote desktop setting. The benefits include access to a very large body of machine-readable texts without violating copyright restrictions. The limitations include inability to verify optical character recognition (OCR) quality for the individual texts that may skew results. Because books are scanned in their entirety, when OCR'd texts are not further cleaned, results include analysis of words that appear in front and back matter as well as chapter headings, all of which influences calculations based on total word counts.

Although it is obvious, we want to emphasize that data sets are subject to interpretation, and we freely confess that what follows is not a disinterested reading. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the ongoing effort by scholars to re-center Black women in the historiography of feminism. Although authors might shy away from the statement made by one historian that "Black feminism developed later than white feminism," too much scholarship still relies on chronologies that reinforce that impression.41 Along with Benita Roth and many other scholars, we conclude that "Black feminism began when second-wave white feminism began. It was part and parcel of it."42 Shifting the criteria for what counts as feminism from formal organizing to theorizing, as Kimberly Springer suggests, makes it clear that Black feminists participated in the development of feminist ideas now widely credited to white feminists active in the later 1960s and early 1970s.43 By extension, this essay positions The Black Woman as an integral part of feminism in the 1970s.44

In each of the three sections that follow, we compare the corpora to highlight what is distinctive about the feminist bestsellers. We anchor these discussions in relevant historiography and then move to close readings of the six bestsellers. These iconic texts are some of the most studied works in 1970s feminism, and the idea that a digital humanities approach alone would reveal new and unexpected interpretations is an unrealistic relic of the novelty factor that continues to inhere to digital humanities. Instead, data guides particular juxtapositions to suggest how The Black Woman should be more extensively incorporated into histories of 1970s feminism.

Feminism and Freudian Experts

Corpus analysis highlights that feminist bestsellers disputed the prevalent assumption that psychology offered particularly relevant insights into contemporary issues. The centrality of psychology in the sample corpus, compared to the combined women and feminist corpus, reflects the prominence of "psychological experts [who] decisively shaped Americans' understanding of what significant public issues were and what should be done about them."45 The reliance on Freudian theories particularly angered many feminists, as reflected in keywords from this corpus, including Freudian, Freudianism, and Oedipal. Entity results further confirm Freud's centrality; he is the first or second most-mentioned person in the feminist corpus.46

When separating the corpora, these distinctions become even more apparent. While the sample corpus is more likely than the woman corpus to include psychoanalysis and psychology (a two-fold difference for both), the feminist corpus is two times more likely than the sample to use psychology and almost eight times more likely to use psychoanalysis.47 This finding is consistent with how the literature depicts them. A 1990s overview of feminism and psychoanalysis credits authors of the four bestselling monographs of 1970 as the "first to fault Freud in the name of feminism." A monograph on Freud's critics repeats this interpretation almost 20 years later: "The year 1970 itself was particularly rough, when, in separate books, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, Shulamith Firestone, and Eva Figes all took Freud to task for his reactionary views on women." That 1990s text addresses Black matriarchy, without references to Black women's writings, in a chapter on 1950s momism. Black feminists instead appear, through works published in 1970 and 1971, as precursors to Nancy Chodorow's 1979 efforts to rescue motherhood from Freud: "Angela Davis and Patricia M. Robinson provided a new narrative of African American history to accentuate the significance of matrifocal factors." Corpus analysis suggests two ways writings in The Black Woman might better fit into this history. Contributors confronted experts and countered Freudian-inspired critiques of the Black family.

As Figes notes in her introduction, "thousands of books have been written about women," most of them reflecting male authors' "bias," "arrogance," and "ignorance,"48 Still, Freudian influences were too strong to be ignored. As feminists attempted to dethrone Freudian thought, they relied on other experts. Both Millett and Greer mention the anthropologist Malinowski to contravene Freud's patriarchal family model, but he receives the most extensive treatment in Figes, who places him in an imagined debate with Freud: "Everyone has to work their way through the Oedipal situation, declares Freud. Pardon me, answers Malinowski, but in the place where I work, families do not recognize the father figure, so the situation simply never arises in the first place. Exit Freud."49 Authors also cited the work of contemporary psychiatrists who criticized the Freudian familial sexual drama. Firestone cites Andrew Salter's The Case Against Psychoanalysis (1952) in her takedown of the Oedipal complex.50 Sexual Politics, The Female Eunuch, The Dialectic of Sex, and Sisterhood is Powerful all rely on psychiatrist Robert Stoller's 1968 Sex and Gender On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity to contradict Freudian theories of normative gender.51

Black women, even more than white feminists, felt the strictures of "the ideal woman of expert discourse," which so often drew on Freudianism.52 There is a statistically significant difference in the usage of experts between authors in The Black Woman and other authors. They were eight times more likely to use experts than Millett and four times more likely than Firestone.53 Bambara's preface methodically demonstrates that all the "experts" are "men, Black or White" and "white women."54 She derides "psychiatrists and the like" who collect "data . . . to reinforce rather than challenge societal expectations" and "breezily build their theories of masculine/feminine."55

Bambara's disdain for psychiatry did not translate into an extensive discussion of Freud by the contributors to her volume. Freud appears by name only twice, mentioned both times by Bambara.56 From the perspective of computational text analysis, literature that ignores The Black Woman in discussions of feminist critiques of Freud may appear justified. However, from a more fundamental perspective, that would be an error. The writers may not have disputed key Freudian concepts in the same way that Millett zeroed in on penis envy, Figes on castration complex, or Firestone on Oedipal complex, all bigrams found in their books. But the results of computational analysis indicate where they aimed their critique: at the Freudian ideas embodied in the Moynihan Report. Moynihan is key to the feminist corpus (having almost an eightfold difference from the sample corpus and more than a thirty-twofold difference from the women corpus).57 Outside of the The Black Woman, only Sisterhood is Powerful and Dialectic of Sex name him.58

Authors in The Black Woman addressed Freud through a surrogate popularizer. Entity recognition results indicate Moynihan is the fourth most mentioned non-fictional person in the anthology. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Department of Labor report on "The Negro Family" offered a damning indictment of its "matriarchal structure." Moynihan drew on "psychoanalytic theory" and quoted extensively from psychologists' studies.59 As Laura Dawkins has observed, the report betrayed an "implicitly Freudian basis" through the "equation of patriarchy and social progress."60 The ensuing public controversy around the report further amplified its Freudian aspects as "many commentators, Black and white, viewed Moynihan through a Freudian lens of sexual psychodrama.61

Bambara names "setting the record straight on the matriarch" as one of her anthology goals, and Keira V. Williams estimates that fully half the essays addressed Moynihan's stereotype.62 While Adele Jones rejects Moynihan's conclusions out of hand as "White sociological bullshit to shift the blame from the white system to the Black woman," other authors relied on different strategies to refute his conclusions.63 Bond and Peery question his quantitative evidence, the rather unimpressive "statistic that one-quarter — only one-quarter! — of all Black families are headed by women."64 Patricia Murphy Robinson, writing on behalf of her Group, offers cross-cultural examples to question the universality of gendered family dynamics: "In the Kalahari Desert in Southwest Africa . . . there is no strong matriarchal or patriarchal emphasis.65 Frances Beal quotes Sojourner Truth in support of her contention that the "middle-class white model" of femininity never applied to Black women.66Although the experts they invoked may have differed from those cited by Figes, Firestone, Greer, and Millett, authors in The Black Woman engaged in the same process to dispute the Freudian conclusions of the Moynihan report.67

In addition to these direct challenges to Moynihan, authors in The Black Woman addressed coded references to his analysis. Terms like matriarch and emasculated, all key in The Black Woman, reflect an immediately recognizable "dog whistle" politics that emerged around the Moynihan report.68 Moynihan's unquestioning acceptance that "males are dominant in family relationships" led him to update the old stereotype of the Black "matriarch" to describe a familial structure that "reversed [the] roles of husband and wife."69 Bond and Peery contend that "the Black matriarch was a kind of folk character largely fashioned by whites." Toni Cade Bambara concurs, encouraging Blacks to "reject . . . the opinions of outside 'experts' who love to explain ourselves to ourselves, telling the Black man that the matriarch is his enemy," an unnamed but completely intelligible reference to Moynihan.70

Essays in The Black Woman also took on the misrepresentation that Black women contributed to or benefited from Black men being emasculated.71 In Moynihan's recasting of the psychosexual drama, Black women replaced the castrating father in a "matriarchal structure [that] . . . imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male" and only secondarily on "a great many Negro women as well."72 Beal notes that "our husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons have been emasculated," but denies that black women share the blame: "it is a gross distortion of fact to state that Black women have oppressed Black men."73 Black women also argued against the idea that they were beneficiaries of this disempowerment. Abbey Lincoln acknowledges that black men have been "emasculated," but points out this does not prove "the propaganda that the only free people in this country are the white man and the Black woman."

Instead, in one of the most significant theoretical formulations of 1970s feminism, authors re-positioned Black women as embedded in multiple structures of oppression, rather than a single gender-based one. Beal's formulation of the "double jeopardy" that results from being both Black and female is echoed by Kay Lindsey's contention that "Black women are penalized on two counts" and Bond and Peery's assertion that "Black women are victimized on two counts: they are women, and they are Black"74 By emphasizing Black women's particular status, authors refuted Moynihan's implication that Black men bore the more significant burdens of racism due to their frustrated masculinity.

The Black Woman's theorizing about women's role in the family, the power dynamics of gender, and the restrictions of prescriptive femininity occurred alongside that by white feminists. The works discussed in The Black Woman date from 1966 to 1969, the same timeframe in which white feminists, whose writings are more often cited, developed their ideas.75 Furthermore, they belonged to the same evolving discourse. As Benita Roth indicates, "black feminist writing was being produced and read by both black and white women."76 Robin Morgan solicited work by Frances Beal for Sisterhood is Powerful and reprinted work by Patricia Robinson and her group that had appeared originally in the women's liberation journal Lilith.77 Computational text analysis highlights Black women's greater challenge to experts expressed most forcefully in their refutation of the Moynihan Report's depiction of the matriarch and emasculated men. This evidence places them, at a much earlier period, in a vital part of the story of feminism's engagement with Freudian thought.

Feminism and Love

If comparison with the sample corpus stresses feminist opposition to Freudian psychology, then comparison to the women corpus reveals yet another distinctive dimension of the feminist corpus. The women corpus contains highly ranked key terms such as marriage and family. As Allison Lefkowitz observed, "a broad array of Americans identified marriage as a problem in the 1960s and 1970s," while another scholar dates the origins of "the war over the family" to this era, beginning with the debate surrounding the Moynihan report that was quickly joined by "radical feminists . . . gays and lesbians . . . divorced people . . . [and] unwed mothers."78

Computational text analysis hints at both commonalities and divergences in this content across the corpora. The feminist corpus overlaps with the sample corpus in terms of the nuclear family as the most frequent family trigram. However, while the sample and women corpus share marriage's trigram marriage and family, the feminist corpus shifts this to love and marriage. Comparing the corpora individually clarifies that a sustained interest in love is distinctive to the feminist corpus. While the feminist and women corpora show effect size divergences from the sample corpus in family, marriage, and love, the feminist corpus uses love twice as much as the women corpus.79 Collocations suggest a different context around love in the corpora. The sample corpus includes religious love, not just romantic love. Love is an ideal and a myth in the feminist corpus, while collocates such as glorious, ecstasy, sweetest in the women corpus indicate more positive connotations.

Feminists' hostility towards love has not gone unremarked upon. In the late 1990s, one scholar placed Millett, Firestone, and Greer within a tradition that "identifies a direct relationship between the practice of love and the reproduction of patriarchal power." A strikingly similar analysis, pointing to the same three authors, appeared nearly 20 years later: "In the 1970s feminists condemned romantic love . . . they opposed and ridiculed romance because it led to domestic oppression for women."

Love is the third most key word in The Female Eunuch; it provides one of four governing concepts in Greer's text.80 In various chapters, she explores a wide range of subjects from the platonic ideal to the love object. The chapter on "The Middle-Class Myth of Love and Marriage" is representative of her approach. It begins with Feudal literature and proceeds through the 18th-century novel. Only in the final few pages does she touch on the contemporary era. On the other hand, ad copy for The Dialectic of Sex, the title with the second most frequent use of love, promised that "the chapter on love will change your life!" — and Firestone did not disappoint.81 She proclaims, "love . . . is the pivot of women's oppression today" and suggests that women might have "to get rid of love."82 For Firestone, romantic love is "love corrupted by its power context."83 On this point, Millett concurs. Love is "emotional manipulation" that blinds women to their oppression.84

But what of The Black Woman? As a recent history, Black Women, Black Love: America's War on African American Marriage, clarifies, Black romantic relationships were framed not by feudal practice, but by those of the federal government.85 Not only did the Moynihan Report depict "Black romantic relationships and sexuality . . . as pathological," but racism created "crippling structural disparities" that impeded them.86 The Black Woman contains family, marriage, and love at the lowest rates, but does that justify its authors' exclusion from feminist theorizing about these subjects? Visualizing the intersection of names extracted from the six feminist texts offered hints as to where the anthology fits into this discussion. Gail Stokes is a contributor to The Black Woman and the subject of Firestone's analysis.

Black feminists have rightly criticized Firestone's treatment of race, and her use of Stokes' writing is equally deserving of condemnation.87 She quotes from Gail Stokes' "Black Woman to Black Man," published in the Liberator in 1968, as evidence that "the black woman has as much contempt for the black man as he has for her."88 Firestone describes Stokes, cast as a modern-day Sapphire, as lobbing "accusations" at the Black man.89 But it isn't just Black men and women Firestone pits against one another. She quotes from Edith Hambrick's response to Stokes, positioning Hambrick, who offers love and unconditional support to Black men, as a dupe who has "fallen for" their "lines."90 Letters to the Editor of the Liberator indicate that Black men took exception to Stokes' writing as well. The Black Men's Council of Boston issued a "decree in answer to sister Gail Stokes" informing "black sisters to get it together."91 Given the likelihood that white feminists, Black men, and even other Black women might use Black feminists' words against them, it is not surprising that Millett, Greer, and Firestone are from two to almost eight times more likely to use love than contributors to The Black Woman.92

There remains, however, an alternative reading of Stokes's piece: she has given up on love.93 The speaker eulogizes her marriage — she has received "no love" from "the human being I thought I loved and that I thought loved me."94 Furthermore, his rejection has come in the most injurious form possible, through an invidious comparison to white women: "how could I love you and want to be with you? . . . White women never open the door for their husbands [looking] the way you Black bitches do."95 Like some white feminists, Stokes equates marriage with death. "I had been laid out in my coffin unknowingly the day I had married you."96 Hers is not the civil death of couverture, but the end of the self that threatens to transform her into "a walking mummy."97 The speaker also points out that racism, along with patriarchy, influences Black romantic relationships. She describes an endless cycle of subordination through unwanted pregnancies and violence that eventually destroyed the love and respect she felt for her partner. While she desires "black love and dignity," she refuses it under the guise of Black Power or Black nationalist-inspired endearments such as "my Black goddess."98 The speaker has given up on her marriage, not because she lacks love for Black men, but because this specific Black man rejected her love.

Stokes's piece in The Black Woman bears a different title, "Black Man, My Man Listen!" but it still personally addresses a Black man. In this version, the speaker pleads with her man to listen instead of "calling" him out.99 Rather than indicting the Black man for his faults, she acknowledges his disempowerment: "I know how they have used and abused you."100 This time, love exists: "you and me, loving each other in our blackness."101 While the speaker still feels anger, her fears replace the detailed complaints of The Liberator piece. In the end, the speaker makes a heartfelt plea for "comfort" and "reassurance," but the allusion, in the final line, to a lack of any commonalities suggests that he never offered them.102

While other essays in The Black Woman do not deal with love at such length, some touch on the subject. Joanna Clark connects love to manipulation: "When my husband said 'love,' he meant whatever emotion he could generate in you that would sustain you enough to put up for and with him."103 Bambara also rejects the female subordination Black nationalists sought to impose on romantic relationships: "Of course there are any number of women around willing to walk ten paces back . . . I happen to love my ole man, and I would be loathe to patronize him in that way."104 Joyce Green's essay also considers comparisons to white women: "some brothers are so busy being masterful that they have no time for a tender concept like love. . . . They say, look at how the white woman helps her man."105 Abbey Lincoln, commenting on Black men's application of white beauty standards to their mates, describes "the Black woman" as "hurt, confused, frustrated, angry, resentful, [and] frightened" an apt description of the speaker in Stokes' articles.106

While in the section on Freud, we argued that histories of 1970s feminism have too often disconnected what were once overlapping contributions, here we suggest that many accounts of feminism's history have not considered sufficiently early Black feminists' perspectives on love.107 My reading indicates that Black feminists addressed the same issues — love as manipulation, love as subordination, love as oppression — as frequently as the white women who were more commonly credited with developing feminist critiques of love. Furthermore, rather than singularly focusing on patriarchy as the mechanism impinging on love, the essays in The Black Woman consider the consequences of racism — poverty, violence against women, and limited economic opportunities — in the process offering a broader structural critique of love.

Proposing Solutions

In the late 1960s, "everything became 'political,'" as a volume on feminism, theory and politics has observed.108 Keyness results for all three corpora support this generalization. Each corpus contains a key word that alludes to politics: political in the sample corpus, rights in the women corpus, and revolution in the feminist corpus.109 The sample corpus uses political at a rate twofold that found in the women or the feminist corpus.110 The context appears to be quite traditional. Frequent bigrams, including political system, political power, and political parties, indicate that the political retained links to formal politics. Alternatively, political in the women corpus revolves around rights. The women corpus is over four times as likely and the feminist corpus twice as likely to use rights as the sample.111 Political rights is the most frequent bigram. The specific rights sought are equal and women's instead of civil, the most common bigram of rights in the other corpora. As in the sample corpus, the methods for obtaining equal rights, such as amendment to the Constitution or from the civil rights act, reflect traditional politics.

For feminists, "everything became 'political' " in different ways. Keyword analysis indicates that instead of rights, authors in the six feminist bestsellers demand revolution and political power, the most common bigram. The feminist corpus is eight times as like to use revolution as the women and twice as likely as the sample.112 In the process of advocating for revolution, feminist authors transformed how the word political was understood.

This achievement is among the most widely recognized of 1970s feminism. A 1990s feminist theory text proceeded to name all the bestsellers except The Black Woman when discussing "the substantial body of literature" about feminism's "new ideas," including the argument that "no aspect of life lacks a political dimension." According to that author, "the articulation of Black feminist critique lay . . . in the future." Over twenty years later, that same conclusion appears in a political science textbook that credits radical feminists — with Figes, Firestone, Greer, and Millett specifically singled out — for contributing to "a deliberate widening of the political sphere." This author views Black feminism as "added on" to "early second wave feminism."

The reframing of the political is most evident in Kate Millett's concept of sexual politics. According to Millett, a real sexual revolution would not merely lead to increased sexual freedom but "would bring the institution of patriarchy to an end."113 Authors in The Black Woman consider the black revolution, the top bigram for revolution, but they also propose that revolution must overturn gendered hierarchies. Gwen Patton concludes from Black women's struggle to "define their role" in "the making of the Revolution" that the order of "men on top, women on bottom" must be abandoned.114 While The Black Woman does not contain the bigram sexual revolution, contributors were quite interested in the same issues Millett addresses in her well-known concept of sexual politics.

This essay does not define the political as that relatively narrow and exclusive world of meetings, chairmen, and parties. The term "politics" shall refer to power-structured relationships, arrangements whereby one group of persons is controlled by another."115

Power, the key concept under sexual politics, is key in the feminist corpus compared to the sample corpus and the feminist corpus.116 It appears most in Dialectic of Sex and The Black Woman, with no statistically significant difference between the two texts.117 Firestone's analysis parallels Millett's by focusing on male power, the most frequent bigram in her book. The Black Woman references the power structure, the most common bigram of power after Black Power, not only the power of patriarchy.

Just as Kate Millett coined the term sexual politics to refer to power dynamics in all interpersonal relationships, contributors to The Black Woman also proposed new terms to explain gendered and racialized power structures. Frances Beal's phrase "bedroom politics" adds both nuance and specificity to Millett's sexual politics.118 The term refers to the intrusion by "political factors into the privacy of the bedchamber," infringing upon Black women's "rights and responsibilities."119 Beal uses the term in the context of forced sterilization of Black women, which she names an "act of oppression" designed to perpetuate the "power imbalance between the white haves and the non-white havenots."120 The "ruling-class elite" uses the abhorrent practice to keep "itself in control." Similarly, she points out that restrictive abortion laws provide yet another "means of subjugation."121 Beal ends her essay by connecting the personal to power. "The Revolutionary cannot focus only on changing who is in a "position of power" but must also commit to "creating new institutions that will eliminate all forms of oppression," including "traditional personal relationships between man and woman."122

Trigrams in The Black Woman point to yet another contribution to theorizing power hierarchies. A reprinted November 1968 speech given by Grace Lee Boggs addresses the white power structure.123 While Boggs uses personal in this speech to refer to the "concept of the individual," her insistence that "social issues" can be "not only personally but socially relevant" relates her analysis to the reframing of the political.124 She offers a "new politics . . . developing in the Black movement." "This sense of one's own personal-political value . . . has to be developed . . . in relationship with others," and it must involve "struggle and conflict with those in power" to define concrete issues of consequence to the group.125 To anyone familiar with feminism of this era, Boggs's formulation of the "personal-political" will recall the "the personal is political," often cited as the defining insight of 1970s feminists. While white feminists have received credit for this formulation, it did not emerge in a vacuum.126 Like so much else in women's liberation, it bears the imprint of writing about Black women's experiences.

The feminist re-framing of the political as power is a signal achievement of 1970s feminism at a time when other writing about women addressed rights. Computational text analysis indicates that The Black Woman has much to offer histories that trace the development of these ideas. The Black Woman uses power, revolution, and political more than The Female Eunuch.127 Why then does Greer get cited along with these other works while The Black Woman gets ignored? Why has Beal's "bedroom politics" or Boggs' "personal-political" not been incorporated along with "sexual politics" in accounts of feminist reconceptualizations of power?

Here I'd like to suggest that this is a (bad) habit of citation. It has become customary to lump the four bestsellers of 1970 together when discussing some of their contributions to feminisms' history. This tendency began in early responses to these books. Most notably, Juliet Mitchell treated all four monographs together to criticize feminism's rejection of Freud.128 Subsequently, disciplinary histories or genealogies situated the texts together in framing the origins of the academic fields of women's studies and feminist theory.129 Those works became the foundation for a "stock narrative" of feminism by authors whose work does not actually focus on these texts.130

Which Books Made Us Feminists?

Although author deaths and publishing anniversaries have inspired recent reflections on some of these titles as books that converted readers to feminism, the tendency has deeper roots. After publishing The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan titled an edited volume of letters she received It Changed My Life, so widespread was the transformative impact of her magnum opus.131 In 1990, the Modern Language Association annual meeting included a session called "Books That Changed Our Lives" with participant-remarks later published in Women's Studies Quarterly.132 However, we have found no considerations of The Black Woman under this particular rubric. As Beverly Guy Sheftall notes, "The Black Woman was as important . . . as Kate Millett's pioneering and more celebrated Sexual Politics, though Bambara's work has rarely been seen in this context by white feminists."133

While high profile newspapers and magazines may not have published authors who considered The Black Woman among the texts that made women feminists, many prominent Black women have written about life-changing encounters with the anthology. Gloria T. Hull, who encountered the book in college, recalled that it "taught me how our position could be both thoroughly feminist and for-real Black."134 As a child, Farah Jasmine Griffins saw the cover depicting "a beautiful brown woman with a large Afro" in a bookstore and knew "I had to have that book."135 bell hooks has acknowledged the importance of The Black Woman on her development: "I was a senior in high school when TCB published The Black Woman: An Anthology (1970), and single-handedly the anthology placed Black women at the center of various feminist debates."136

The methods section conveyed a frank disavowal of disinterested readings and a defense of computational text analysis as a method for making historiographical interventions. It seems fitting then that my conclusion should sum up how these two factors shaped the ensuing discussion of results. To those who fear that computers will overtake our training as historians, our approach — historical interpretation assisted by computational analysis — might offer some reassurances. We are guided by the results, not driven by them. We began with a commitment to foregrounding The Black Woman.

In challenging Freudianism, feminists of the 1970s receive at least partial credit for contributing to the decline of a major intellectual force. Concluding that Black women never addressed Freud because The Black Woman barely names him seems overly simplistic. Computational text analysis suggested how to read The Black Woman for Freudianism. The authors scoffed at penis envy and mocked the "white man's penis hang up," but they focused on the Freudian-influenced Moynihan Report.137 Keyness and entity recognition pointed to Moynihan. His report reflects a reliance on psychology similar to that seen in the sample corpus and in feminists' efforts to de-center psychoanalysis. Follow-up computational analysis highlighted important contributions in The Black Woman to these intellectual projects, including the greater frequency of experts and keywords used in opposing Moynihan's conclusions, including matriarch and emasculated.

Looking for love relied on a totally different strategy. We suspect this element of the project is most vulnerable to the charge that computational text analysis proves unnecessary. Perhaps this is true, but we reached these conclusion with it nonetheless. Keyness results in the women corpus, such as marriage and family, indicated a point of departure for considering what feminist bestsellers added to the discussion of these very topical concerns. Firestone and Greer devoted entire sections of their books to love, while evidence for this concern in The Black Woman is scant; marriage, family, and love appear with the least frequency in The Black Woman. Naming the problem could never be as simple as indicting men for Black women. Furthermore, Black love, constrained since slavery, as Patricia Robinson's essay reminds readers, remained a loaded topic for Black women who faced external criticism from white policy analysts and censure within their community.138 The reasons behind the silences and absences offered a way to relate the texts when entity recognition pointed to Firestone's appropriation of Stokes' writing. With the themes of her work in mind, I used AntConc's concordance view to explore love throughout the anthology and confirmed she was not alone in her analysis.

Feminists received the greatest recognition for interventions into political discourses and for the theoretical concepts they developed to replace those they dismantled. Power appeared in The Black Woman in ways that related quite directly to better-known formulations by white feminists. Computational text analysis identified at least two key terms related to reframing the political, Beal's "bedroom politics" and Boggs' "personal-political." This analysis also provided the clearest example of where the habit of lumping the 1970 monographs together had given credit where it wasn't quite due. Although examination of Greer's book using different terms might have found her to be a more significant participant in dialogues around the political, in the terms used for this study, The Black Woman contributed to these discussions more than The Female Eunuch did.

These results offer a new kind of counterpoint to a historiographical tradition that often dates Black feminism's emergence to the late 1970s. Descriptions of The Black Woman as the "Black women's equivalent of Sisterhood Is Powerful" unjustifiably prioritize one work over the other. The results shared in this essay are meant to inspire scholars to reconsider the texts they teach, the individuals they cite, and the genealogies they trace, as well as to demonstrate that methods adopted from the digital humanities may bring renewed attention to some of the authors that computational text analysis singled out.

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Michelle Moravec is an associate professor of history at Rosemont College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  Her digital history research has been published in the Journal of Women's History, American Historical Review, Australian Feminist Studies,  Boundary 2, Artl@s Bulletin, and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. 

Kent K. Chang is a PhD student in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies modern and contemporary literature and culture using computational methods found in natural language processing and machine learning. His work has appeared in Journal of Cultural Analytics.

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