I just came across a tweet to an important youtube video from 2011 featuring Loretta Ross of SisterSong, Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective in which she traced the origins of the phrase “women of color” to the activism of a delegation of black women from Washington, D.C to the National Women's Conference in Houston (November 1977). Ross offers a deep political analysis, which is very valuable. Please watch it.

As someone who has spent a lot of time working with large bodies of texts by and about women in American history, I wondered if the phrase “women of color” had occurred prior to 1977 and if so how uses had shifted in regards to shifting histories of race in America. Below are some preliminary results, (more indpeth corpus analysis working here)

Even though google ngram has some flaws I started with Mark Davies excellent interface to it.  I can get back to 1804 Zoflora; or, The generous negro girl, from the Fr. of J.B. Piguenard By Jean Baptiste Picquenard


I narrowed down two ways women of color appears in antebellum Nineteenth Century American English*

1. To denote largely outside the British United States,** in societies formed around complex hierarchies of color, women who were neither black nor white.

Charles Augustus Goodric, writing about Cartagena “The women of color, the offspring of negresses and white men” (Land We Live In; Or, Travels, Sketches and Adventures in North and South 1857)

2. to denote within the United States, during a time when divisions revolved around free or slave, women who were neither white nor slave.

as in an act passed in 1857 by the Louisiana State Legislature “for the relief of Aspasie and Catiche Boham, free women of color

The above phrase “free women of color” or “free people of color” clearly reflects the increased codification of slavery over the course of the early 19th century as more restrictions were placed on slaves and as manumission became increasingly impossible. It also reflect the rigidification of the color line as free versus slave came to reflect the idea of permanent immutable racialized slavery. In short the law needed some way to refer to people who were neither white nor free.

Following the Civil War, I found a fascinating use by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in an address to the New York State Legislature, Jan. 23, 1867, during debate over revisions to the State Constitution to modify qualifications for suffrage based on the abolition of slavery

I have inquired into your practice with regard to women of color. I find that in Seneca Falls, there lives a highly estimable colored woman, by the name of Abby Gomore who owns property to the amount of a thousand dollars, in village lots. She now pays, and always has paid … the same taxes as other citizens

Interestingly here we see “women of color” occurring in the presence of another legal discourse, qualification for voting. While advocating for woman suffrage, Stanton here makes an extended argument that the mechanisms for excluding people from suffrage, on the basis of race, class and gender, are the same.

Following the abolition of slavery, use of the term “women of color” continued to appear in the U.S. interchangeably with freed women (Southern Workman 1903), and with colored women (Southern Workman 1905). Similarly, in the Sewanee Review (1905) the phrase referred to free blacks in the south prior to the Civil Car “Thus was created a class of free men and women of color with intelligence, character and ambition.”

It also continued, in historical writings about the Caribbean, or French America, to refer to “not whiteness.” For example, Herbert Elmer Mills in his history, The Early Years of the French Revolution in San Domingo (1892) made reference to “free women of color … living as mistresses of white men” in the 18th century. Similarly, Henry Rightor in Standard History of New Orleans, Louisiana describes “women of color (mulattos).

What I really want however is to find out if women I would call African American used any of these terms.  Part of what confounds my search is the prevalence of the 1982 The Bridge Called My Back, subtitled Writings by Women of Color, which clearly helped move the phrase into the mainstream and into academic feminist discourse. However, because Google ngram seems to be pulling any page on which This Bridge appears as a “related book” as containing the phrase “women of color” I can’t rely on it completely.

I hand search for uses before the 1970s  of the phrase “women of color.” I look at works by Ida B Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and Anna Julia Cooper. I find in the latter’s annotated work, editor Charles Lement suggestion that while generally Cooper used "women of color" as an alternative to “Negro“ or to the “Nigger,” Sojourner Truth is said to have used that

it is possible that she also used "colored woman" in a sense closer to today's expression ‘women of color’ -- referring, that is, to all women whose racial and social situations set them off from generically universal, or white women

This is intriguing so I am now looking  at Negro v colored in the corpus of historical American English. (research notes here)

Still how did women of color emerge as a marker of solidarity. Pinning down the last shift, that noted by Ross, “women of color” as an explicit political move proves hard. For the period I study, the 1960s and 1970s, I know Third World Women was a far more common designator originating in the late 1960s.

I find, via JSTOR a 1974 article in The Black Scholar announcing events for international women’s day which uses “women of color” interchangeably with Third World Women. I find that intriguing, as it seems to offer a potential idea of solidarity with post-colonial struggles, which is what the term Third World Women was meant to imply.

I also find in a 1974 report on Angela Davis’ speech at UCLA, her call for unity among “working women, particularly black women and other women of color” [“angela davis on women, Off Our Backs Vol. 4, No. 7 (June 1974), p. 10]. This too is extremely intriguing as it points to a cross class implication that I think has been lost in contemporary uses of “women of color.” Davis also uses the phrase in her 1981 Women, Race, and Class, which no doubt also contributed to the spread of it to indicate of solidarity among women.

Even as I pick through these results I’m reminded of reading something very recently (I cannot recall where) that part of the problem with computational analyses in the digital humanities is that we are overly reliant on texts, which are not the same as the spoken word.   It seems very likely that “women of color” circulated in movement conversations before it made it into print.

I poke around a bit more.  I really wanted to get an explicitly African American corpus, so I attempted to use the exact phrase search in the Library of Congress Chronicling America digitized newspaper database, which can be restricted to search just African American newspapers. This did not work. My attempts to locate colored Negro women/an returns over 7 million hits and without a way to analyze those, I can’t make any sense of the results. For “women of color”, but it appears that “of” is one of the “very common words, such as and, of, the, a, and to, are ignored even when matching exact phrases.” I also attempt to search as a cluster, but since the smallest N is 5, that doesn’t work either. I move on. I pop over to Trove, the Australian newspaper database, that offers an article regarding “European soldiers” who married “women of color” in India. [The Argus (Melbourne, Vic) Friday 7 December 1849, p. 2]. This points to some very interesting possible extensions of “women of color” across Anglophone locations in a colonial context.

I pop over to Reveal Digital's Indpendent Voices Collection, which contains movement periodicals. I find in July 20 1973 issue of Ain’t I A Woman, a journal that appropriately takes its name from Sojourner Truth’s infamous rejoinder to white feminists, that the phrase “women of color” appears in an article used interchangeably with Third World Women. Ain’t I A Woman is an early women’s liberation movement periodical about which little has been written. I’m completely curious now as to who is writing it. More digging reveals that at least some indexes of the alternative press have identified it as a lesbian-feminist publication. As The Lesbian Connection pops up in Reveal Digital as the next earliest periodical after Ain’t I A Woman I am reminded of the prevalence of lesbian women in early white women’s anti-racism efforts at the organization I studied, as well as the importance of many important black lesbians in formulating what we now call women of color feminism . The overlaps in what we think of as discrete discursive communities of feminists are extremely interesting and warrant much further linguistic analysis.

In this case, my text based analysis has gotten me to a place I’d not have thought to look (Iowa), which makes me wonder how many more hidden origins stories can’t I find, in the periodicals that aren’t digitized yet. I’m extremely curious about Triple Jeopardy (1971-1975) published by Third World Women’s Alliance and Black Women Organized for Action, which also published a newsletter What It Is, beginning in 1973. Even without full digital access I can generally get some sense from google books, but neither appear at all! As always I seem to be bumping up against the politics of digitization.

However the analysis I did here, combined with close readings and a lot of hand hunting, highlights women of color as a complex term that has been reformulated and refashioned as a marker of self identity. As Ross emphasizes the resurgence of “women of color” in feminist discourse of the 1970s relied on an explicit political commitment, not a desire to describe an essentialist racialized identity. Her video reminds me why we need these testimonies.

*Tricia Matthew drew my attention to a similar dynamic in the 1808 The Woman of Colour. A Tale. Anonymous  about the offspring of an Englishman and a slave in Jamaica].  note, i just saw a tweet to the The Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC).  I ran the search there with no results for “women of color”