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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Barbara McCaskill and Layli Phillips could feel the excitement. For the first time, a national conference on African-American women in academia was under way.
 The time was 1994, and the place was a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some 2,000 black women were sharing scholarship in the social sciences, the humanities and the hard sciences. The timing seemed perfect to start a modest newsletter that would keep all these people in touch with each other, so McCaskill, an assistant professor of English at UGA, and Phillips, an assistant professor of psychology, took the plunge.
Six years later, the newsletter has turned into Womanist Theory and Research, a peer-reviewed journal with a subscription base of 3,000 and growing.
“It’s really been a pleasure, and we’re all very proud of it,” says McCaskill. “We like to edit it in such a way that it seems one person wrote it all, though we have contributors from many places. We want the readers to think that they’re sitting down to read a book that one author wrote, to make it seamless.”
Phillips finds the journal equally exciting.
“I’ve been totally gratified by it,” she says. “To keep it going on a regular basis has been a challenge on top of everything else, but we’ve had incredible interest from all kinds of people and been written up in magazines like Essence and Emerge. It’s been great pulling it all together.”
Feminist issues concerning women of color is so new to academia that the field is really just beginning. The term “womanist” was popularized by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker in her book In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, and it refers specifically to feminism as seen and studied by women of color.
Phillips says that she and McCaskill had discussed some kind of newsletter even before attending the conference, but meeting with hundreds of other black women scholars cemented their desire to start one. They began to talk about the idea, and some 50 people had signed up for the newsletter even before the conference ended.
Spreading the word about African-American women in the academy wouldn’t be easy. Few of them even knew where to start. One pioneering effort had been the journal Sage, published by Spelman College in Atlanta for nearly a decade, but it was near the end of its life. Sage had focused on the humanities, and McCaskill and Phillips wanted to open their new newsletter to the sciences as well.
The first issue of the Womanist came out less than six months later. The issue contained numerous in-depth articles, on such subjects as “Storytelling as an Emancipatory Tool among Women of African Descent.”
With strong support from R. Baxter Miller, director of UGA’s Institute for African-American Studies, the journal took off. While Miller’s support made the first issue possible, more funding was crucial.
“About that time, Sage ended its run after 10 years, so we re-thought our decision to make it a newsletter and decided to turn it into a real journal,” says McCaskill.
A Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship for $250,000 gave the journal national support.
“It was great, because we knew only too well how many womanist scholars and feminists of color didn’t have a place to publish their research, and we were able to help them,” says Phillips.
The grant included fellowships to bring scholars to UGA for research on women-of-color issues. Together, the journal and the fellowships provided one of the strongest programs for research by and for women of color.
Although the Rockefeller Foundation funding has now run out and the resident fellowships have ended, the journal is as active as ever. A conference this spring sponsored by the women’s studies program at Texas Women’s University focused on theorizing black feminism, and proceedings from that meeting will be published in the Womanist.
Feminism has begun to mature as a field of study, McCaskill explains. Still, studies of feminism by women of color have barely gained a foothold in the academy, and so it’s an exciting time to be involved, the editors say.
“Honestly, we’re at ground zero developmentally for African-American feminism in the academy,” says McCaskill. “We think journals like WTR can help bring scholars and issues together.”
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