Until recently, the academy of higher education did not perceive that the leadership of black women merited scholarly analysis. Thus, the knowledge about how black women in the United States learned to lead and the political forces driving such learning remained primarily oral or described in private correspondence (White, 1999). Those studies about the leadership of women that surfaced in the 1970s and 1980s tended to examine middle- to upper-class white women without commensurate attention to women from other classes or women of colour (Collins, 2000; White, 1999). Collins (1998) challenged that the generic application of the term feminism within these studies emphasised gender and sexist issues and disrupted notions of racial solidarity vital to survival for black women. They failed to consider carefully the impact of the modern-day stereotype of the black female professional, i.e. the black lady, who is portrayed as de-sexed and assertive, carrying out the authority of the dominant corporate culture through quasi-administrative leadership roles (Collins, 2000). With beginning acknowledgement by the academies in the late 1980s and 1990s of the legitimacy of black feminist and black womanist scholarship, a few studies shifted the focus of black women's leadership from the margin to the centre of examination and challenged the gender and racial neutral presumptions (Collins, 2000). White's (1999) analysis of the history of black women's leadership within five black women's national organisations in the United States between 1894 and 1994 is one such study. Through her painstaking investigation of newspaper clippings, meeting minutes, personal correspondence and interviews she explored how and why black women such as Mary Church Turrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Helena Wilson, Johnnie Tillmon, and Brenda Eichelberger respectively led the National Association of Colored Women, the National Council of Negro Women, the Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the National Black Feminist Organization. Believing that neither black men nor white women were effectively addressing issues confronting the black community in the United States, these five women crusaded extensively to bond together local black women's clubs into national social advocacy and political organisations throughout the twentieth century.