For book synopsis, click on book cover. We'd love to hear from you . When a doctor advises a black woman to start an exercise program and she wonders how she can do it without breaking a sweat.
All black women are, in one way or another.
The issue is not only about looking good, but about feeling adequate in a society where the beauty standards are unobtainable for most women. Tenderheaded boldly throws open the closet where black women's skeletons have been threatening to burst down the door. In poems, essays, cartoons, photos, and excerpts from novels and plays, women and men speak to the meaning hair has for them, and for society. Art historian Henry John Drewal explores how hairstyles, in Yoruba culture, indicate spiritual destiny, and activist Angela Davis questions how her message of revolution got reduced to a hairstyle. Tenderheaded is as rich and diverse as the children of the African diaspora.