Publishing her views on Black male oppression transformed Michele Wallace into
a kind of feminist superstar back in 1979—and it made her a target of scorn—in some households, neighborhoods and vaunted civil rights organizations.
That year, her signature tome, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, was “largely demonized. It was put in the same category as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide … which is a device for dismissing those books for being ‘man-hating,’” says Beverly Guy-Sheftall, founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College and an Emory University women’s studies professor.
“Mostly,” says Guy-Sheftall, whom Wallace calls a friend and mentor, “it was Black people doing the demonizing.”
It was, Guy-Sheftall adds, an unmerited attack on Wallace, whose book is being released again in June 2015. Despite its naysayers, Black Macho was lauded by several prominent Black and non-Black feminists, including pioneers Audre Lord and Gloria Steinem.
Wallace forged ahead.
On the road to her current post as a City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center) professor of English, women’s studies, film studies and Africana studies, Wallace also taught at Rutgers and Cornell universities.
