Feminist to Know: Barbara Smith

Barbara Smith is a Black lesbian activist, author, academic, and organizer who has been a foundational member of the contemporary feminist movement in the United States. She was a member of the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist group that advocated for Black political feminism and linked race, class, and gender as inextricable in feminist politics. As Smith herself has said, “We were black feminists because we believed we had to work to make change in the actual world, as opposed to just embracing a set of ideas.” Later, Smith went on to found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, which published authors such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. A published author herself, Smith continues to be a leading academic and public thinker. Smith’s work was crucial to the original conception of identity politics (this would later lead to Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality), which introduced the idea that a person’s intersections of marginalization shape their lived experience. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her work. Overall, Smith is responsible for forming much of the basis for contemporary feminism today.