WRRC: Dr. Beverly Guy-Sheftall

Who should be first? With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as frontrunners, the 2008 Democratic primary campaign was a watershed moment in U.S. history. Offering the choice of an African American man or a white woman as the next Democratic candidate for president, the primary marked an unprecedented moment—but one that painfully echoed previous struggles for progressive change that pitted race and gender against each other.

Who Should Be First? collects key feminist voices that challenge the instances of racism and sexism during the presidential campaign season, offer personal reflections on this historic moment, and trace the historic legacy of opposing issues of race and gender that informed debates and media representations of the 2008 Democratic primary.

Over thirty leading feminists contribute to the book, including Patricia J. Williams, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Carol Moseley Braun, Maureen Dowd, Katha Pollitt, Pearl Cleage, Robin Morgan, Erica Jong, Mark Anthony Neal, and M. Jacqui Alexander. Editors Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Johnnetta Betsch Cole deftly balance these charged conversations in the first collection on this key moment in contemporary U.S. history.

“This anthology of brilliant essays and reflections captures the passion and raw emotion of the 2008 dialogue about race, gender, and generational diversity among feminists. It furthers an important conversation about what it means to be a feminist in the twenty-first century.” — Wilma Mankiller, author of Every Day is a Good Day: Reflections by Contemporary Indigenous Women

“Guy-Sheftall and Cole have performed an invaluable service. This is a timely and riveting compendium of perspectives on the most important election of our times. A must-read for anyone interested in how U.S. politics intersects with race and gender.” — Alison Bernstein, coauthor of Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations: Conversations about Difference in the United States and South Africa

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Guy-Sheftall Named Appointed President of National Women's Organization

Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., has been named the president of the National Women's Studies Association, a professional organization that is "dedicated to leading the field of women's studies, as well as its teaching, learning, research, and service wherever they be found."

A member of the NWSA since its founding in 1977, Guy-Sheftall will oversee the Governing Council and policy implementation and general administration of the organization.

The NWSA was recently granted ongoing support form the Ford Foundation in the form of a two-year, $350,000 grant. The organization will use the grant to continue building organizational capacity, implement its strategic plan, and strengthen its Women of Color Leadership Project through collaboration with Spelman College.

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Biographical Sketch
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies. She is also adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she teaches graduate courses.

At the age of sixteen, she entered Spelman College where she majored in English and minored in secondary education. After graduation with honors, she attended Wellesley College for a fifth year of study in English. In 1968, she entered Atlanta to pursue a master’s degree in English; her thesis was entitled, “Faulkner’s Treatment of Women in His Major Novels.” A year later she began her first teaching job in the Department of English at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1971 she returned to her alma mater Spelman College and joined the English Department.

She has published a number of texts within African American and Women’s Studies which have been noted as seminal works by other scholars, including the first anthology on Black women’s literature, Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (Doubleday, 1980), which she coedited with Roseann P. Bell and Bettye Parker Smith; her dissertation, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); and an anthology she co-edited with Rudolph Byrd entitled Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality (Indiana University Press, 2001).

Her most recent publication is a book coauthored with Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women’s Equality in African American Communities (Random House, 2003). In 1983 she became founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women which was devoted exclusively to the experiences of women of African descent.