In the early 1970s, the Black Power Movement in Britain was in a state of peril. Having long been pushed to the sidelines of the movement, Black women activists were in open rebellion. Challenging the patriarchal arrangements of Black organising spaces, they began meeting independently of the men in their organisations. Forming women’s caucuses in organisations such as the Black Panthers and the Black Unity and Freedom Party, these early study groups were to lay the foundation for the burgeoning Black Women’s Movement. This paper maps a cartography of the social, cultural and intellectual experiments cultivated by Black women’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Honing a collective voice, Black women crafted an analysis of the racialised, gendered and economic dimensions of their subjection in Britain. Focusing on the debates, sites of contention and knowledge produced by working-class Black women in the second half of the twentieth century, this paper illuminates the genealogies of Black women’s artistic and intellectual practices and the contributions they made to contemporary Black feminist thought.

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Jade Bentil is a writer and historian from South London. She holds a DPhil in History from Merton College, the University of Oxford. Situated in Black feminist thought, her scholarship uses oral history methodologies to centre the experiences of Black women of African and Caribbean descent in Britain and their long histories of rebellion. For her doctoral scholarship on the Black Women’s movement, Jade was awarded the 2022 Diversity and Inclusion Fellowship from the North American Conference on British Studies, the 2023 Justin Champion Fellowship in Black British History from the Institute of Historical Research, and the 2024 Drusilla Dunjee Houston Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. Jade’s debut book, REBEL CITIZEN, uses oral history interviews to explore the lived experiences of Black women who migrated to Britain following the Second World War and is forthcoming from Allen Lane. Her debut monograph, an oral history of the Black Women’s movement, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Jade is currently teaching a course on Black British Feminism as part of the MSt in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Oxford.