

It was while teaching a course called ‘ The Black Woman’ to middle school girls in 1970 that Collins realised the dearth of intellectual material on the lives of African-American women and the significance of this dearth. Collins worked as a school teacher and curriculum expert at schools in Boston. It was during this time that her worldview and horizon expanded and she got exposed to the sociology of knowledge which later proved fundamental in her development of the concept of ‘standpoint epistemology’. She completed her Bachelors in Sociology from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1969 and Masters in teaching from Harvard University in 1970. She later works on the intersectionality between race, class, gender was influenced by her early childhood experiences of being the only African-American or first African-American woman in her educational environment.

Patricia Hill Collins born to Albert Hill and Eunice Rudolph Hill on May 1 st, 1948 in Philadelphia grew up in a middle-class family as an only child.
