In support of #BlackHERstory Month, we’ll be posting about one current black feminist leader or organization each weekday in February. Tune in daily to learn more about black women’s history, feminism, and the reproductive justice movement!
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Ph.D., is the founder of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College, where she currently works as an Anna Julia Cooper Professor of women’s studies and an English professor. She is also an adjunct professor at Emory University’s Institute for Women’s Studies where she teaches graduate courses in their doctoral program.
Beverly Guy Sheftall was instrumental in bringing the women’s studies movement to women of color, and the voices of women of color to women’s studies. She is an important figure in what she once described toMs. Magazine as “the stunning tradition of black female intellectualism,” according to Makers.
Raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Guy-Sheftall has spent most of her adult life at Spelman College, the oldest historically black college for women. She entered Spelman as a student at the age of 16, where she studied English and secondary education. After receiving her Masters in English from Atlanta University and teaching briefly at Alabama State University, she returned to Spelman in 1971. She has taught there ever since, providing the leadership to create the first women’s studies major at a historically black college, according to Makers.
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