Barbara Smith (born November 16, 1946)[1][a] is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States.
Although the Smith family was of relatively little means, her grandmother, aunts, and mother were all well-educated, especially for the level of education accessible to Black women in the 1940s and 1950s.
Although Barbara and her sister grew up in the northern United States, her family retained its southern roots and traditions from rural Georgia.
Barbara describes her identity as that of a southern woman and credits her family's experience with intense racial trauma in Georgia as a catalyst for her activism.
During her year at the New School for Social Research, Smith traveled to Chicago and participated in the protests accompanying the Democratic National Convention.
[15] After graduating from Mount Holyoke, Smith took a break from front-line activism, where she felt constrained by her identity as a woman in the Black nationalist movement.
But after attending a meeting of the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), she reentered the sphere of activism and began collaborating with many notable women of color.
[19] Frustrated by the lack of communication from the national organization, but also realizing that the Boston chapter's politics were significantly more radical than the NBFO's, the group decided to split off entirely.
[19] The Combahee River Collective Statement[20] outlines the group's objectives, but also identifies it as a class-conscious, sexuality-affirming Black feminist organization.
As a socialist Black feminist organization, the collective emphasized the intersections of racial, gender, heterosexist, and class oppression in the lives of African Americans and other women of color.
After being enthralled by James Baldwin's novel Go Tell It on the Mountain she resolved to become an expatriate writer, but due to her interest in social movements in the 1960s, she resigned herself to literature studies at home.
[26] She pursued graduate study in literature in an attempt to seek out female writers of color, but came to terms with the fact that the American literary canon did not include Black women.
Smith has said that Kitchen Table's legacy lies in contemporary publishing, as women of color writers such as Walker and Toni Morrison have entered the American literary canon, as well as influencing feminist studies to incorporate intersectionality as a lens of inquiry.
[26] Smith continued to write and produced a collection of her essays, articles, and reviews after her involvement in Kitchen Table ended.
[37] Smith introduced the concept of “the simultaneity of oppressions,” urging feminists to recognize how race, class, and gender interact to create unique challenges.
Thompson argues that Smith was among the key theorists who expanded feminist discourse by emphasizing the critical role of class in understanding gender oppression.
This analysis contributed to a shift in feminist scholarship during the 1970s and 1980s, encouraging the movement to consider how economic marginalization influenced women’s experiences of gender-based discrimination.
[39] Barbara Smith extended her feminist activism to global issues, particularly the impact of nuclear warfare on marginalized communities.
[40] She advocated for a feminist response that addressed nuclear threat through an intersectional perspective, linking it to other forms of oppression like racism, economic disparity, and gender-based violence.
Smith’s approach emphasized collective action across social justice movements, viewing feminist critique as a tool to confront global systems of power.
She also worked during this period with David Kaczynski at New Yorkers for Alternatives to the Death Penalty on innovative solutions to violent crime.
[41] During her two terms on the Albany Common Council, Smith was active on issues of youth development, violence prevention, and educational opportunities for poor, minority and underserved persons.