Black undergraduate college women's construction of feminism and the intersection of race and gender categories at a predominantly White public college in the Midwestern United States were explored as part of a larger ethnographic study about women's college experiences and identity. This study examines 30 women's implicit notions of identity as they relate to gender and race. Study participants interacted during focus group discussions and described their notions of appropriate womanhood as silent, passive, motherly, and religious. Although these women encouraged strength and assertiveness for members of their group as a more empowering notion of womanhood, they also acknowledged that women who displayed these empowering characteristics found them to be a liability on this college campus. (Contains 8 footnotes.)