Introduction to Special Issue: Black Girlhood and Kinship

CORINNE T. FIELD is an associate professor in the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia and the Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is currently completing a monograph titled Grand Old Women and Modern Girls: Age, Race, and Power in the U.S. Women’s Rights Movement, 1870 to 1920 and co-editing (with LaKisha Simmons) an interdisciplinary anthology on the global history of black girlhood. She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (2014) and co-editor (with Nicholas Syrett) of Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present (2015). Field is the co-founder of the History of Black Girlhood Network, an informal collaboration of scholars working to promote research into the historical experience of black girls. She was the co-organizer of the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference held at the University of Virginia, April 17–18, 2017.

LAKISHA MICHELLE SIMMONS is an assistant professor of history and women’s studies at University of Michigan. She is the author of Crescent City Girls: The Lives of Young Black Women in Segregated New Orleans (2015), which won the SAWH Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for best book in Southern women’s history and received Honorable Mention for the ABWH Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for the best book in African American women’s history. Simmons has written about black girlhood and historical method in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, about black college students and sexual cultures in the 1930s for Gender and History, and on Southern black girl writers in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is currently working on a book about black motherhood and histories of love and loss. Her essay “Pull the Sorrow from between My Legs” in the edited collection The Lemonade Reader (2019) explores Beyoncé’s Lemonade as a meditation on miscarriage and child loss.