In her article "Feminisms," Jane Donawerth describes Kindred as a product of more than two decades of recovery of women's history and literature that began in the 1970s. The republication of a significant number of slave narratives, as well as the work of Angela Davis, who highlighted the heroic resistance of the black female slave, introduced science fiction writers such as Octavia Butler and Suzy McKee Charnas to a literary form that redefined the heroism of the protagonist as endurance, survival, and escape.Donawerth, Jane. "Feminisms: Recovering Women's History." The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Ed. Mark Bould et al. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. 218-219. As Lisa Yaszek notes further, many of these African-American woman's neo-slave narratives, including Kindred, discard the lone male hero in favor of a female hero immersed in family and community. Robert Crossley sees Butler's novel as an extension of the slave women's memoirs exemplified by texts such as Harriet Ann Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, especially in its portrayal of the compromises the heroine must make, the endurance she must have, and her ultimate resistance to victimization.In Kindred, by Octavia Butler. Boston: Beacon, 2004. 278-279.
