by Various
These black women wrote, it seems, about almost everything, from the most intensely personal to the broadly political, sometimes prophetically. For example, Mary Church Terrell focused not only on women’s suffrage but also the convict lease system: “Those who need laborers for their farms, saw mills, brick yards, turpentine distilleries, coal or phosphate mines, or who have large contracts of various kinds, lease the misdemeanants from the county or State, which sells them to the highest bidder with merciless disregard of the fact that they are human beings, and practically gives the lessee the power of life and death over the unfortunate man or woman thus raffled off.” Her scathing report exemplifies why the government, investigators, and journalists play an important role in protecting human rights even after humanitarian laws are passed. Comparisons can be drawn between Terrell’s work and the work of those today who fight mass incarceration. Fighting a different but equally important battle, Williams demanded recognition for women’s intellectual labor: “are we not justified in a feeling of desperation against that peculiar form of Americanism that shows respect for our women as servants and contempt for them when they become women of culture?”
We offer a separate section on “Education and Social Reform” to collect together essays and speeches that offer wide-ranging thoughts about the nation, race prejudice, and the role of education in envisioning a less violent and divisive future. This section includes speeches from the remarkable Fanny M. Jackson Coppin on industrial education for women. Education as a means of black advancement was Coppin’s greatest concern. Her goal was to see black individuals able freely to seek the educations that best suited them. To a greater degree than her more scholarly contemporaries, Coppin strikes a balance in her addresses between higher-minded, religious discourse and practical steps that can be taken to improve the lives of African American women. Josephine J. Turpin Washington, in “Needs of Our Newspapers,” offers a constructive critique of the black press, which allowed her and so many of the other voices in this anthology to be heard, demanding better quality and more originality. Her sweeping argument takes into account economics, aesthetics, politics, and history. Washington’s work was impressively analytical. She was endlessly determined to see the standing of the women and men of the race improve.
Notable in Julia Caldwell-Frazier’s work is an interest in Darwin. She cites his theory of evolution as evidence of the inevitability of black progress: “According to the ‘survival of the fittest,’ the Negro can look cheerfully and hopefully to the future. . . . The physical, mental, moral, and esthetic faculties of the race have been ‘weighed in the balance and not found wanting.’” Gertrude Bustill Mossell writes on the contributions of African Americans in musical culture, in poetry, and in political activism, giving pride of place among her peers to the formidable champion of anti-lynching laws: “Perhaps the greatest work of philanthropy yet accomplished by any woman of the race is that undertaken and so successfully carried out at the present hour by Miss Ida B. Wells.”
We end this section with the fiery and unforgettable work of Wells in waking the nation to this scourge of lynching. Emphasized here too is that Wells was supported in her work by other women who promoted her, hosted her, and comforted her. Mossell describes Wells visiting Frances Harper in Philadelphia and learning that her writings had provoked a violent response. “What was her consternation to find letters pouring in upon her from friends and correspondents at Memphis warning her not to return to her office on pain of being lynched. She was informed that her newspaper plant had been destroyed and the two male editors had been forced to flee for their lives.” Readers then and now, P. Gabrielle Foreman writes, “were fascinated with the details of authors’ lives . . . [and] the involving trajectory of an increasingly documented race history.”6
Finally, “Women Memorializing Women” offers works at the end of the century that take stock of the contributions of African American women writers. Lucy Wilmot Smith’s “Women as Journalists: Portraits and Sketches of a Few of the Women Journalists of the Race” anticipates the work of this anthology, and so many that proceeded it, insisting that the work of women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. S. Elizabeth Frazier, in “Some Afro-American Women of Mark,” a riff on Rev. William Simmons’s Men of Mark (1887) lauds Fanny Jackson Coppin with a tinge of sadness: “Had she been other than an American colored woman, or had she not had to struggle against the characteristic conservatism of the Society of Friends, she would have been one of the most famous of American’s school reform instructors. As it is she works on modestly, indeed, too self-deprecating; eminent, but without notoriety.” Frazier’s touching appreciation of her intellectual sister’s uphill battle for recognition provokes us to read, remember, and re-acknowledge the contributions of each of these writers whose works are gathered together in this collection.
Consider too the women never given the opportunity to seek literacy and education. What accomplishments, what writings remain of the countless black women who never became members of the publishing elite? “Historical scholarship on black women especially has yet to map the broad contours of their political and social thought in any detail,” writes Mia Bay, “or to examine their distinctive intellectual tradition.”7 The range of works by the fifty-two writers featured here offers readers a glimpse of how impressively expansive the contours of the remarkably vibrant and dynamic African American woman’s intellectual tradition are.
HOLLIS ROBBINS AND HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR.
NOTES
1.Gloria Wade-Gayles, “Black Women Journalists in the South, 1880–1905: An Approach to the Study of Black Women’s History.” Callaloo, no. 11–13 (February–October 1981): 138–152.
2.Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 3.
3.Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds., “Introduction,” in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 4.
4.Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 12, 13.
5.Bay et al., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, 89.
6.P. Gabrielle Foreman, Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 94.
7.Bay et al., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, 1.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Andrews, William L. Introduction to Six Women’s Slave Narratives. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Bay, Mia. Introduction to The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, by Ida B. Wells. New York: Penguin Books, 2014.
Bay, Mia, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds. Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Bassard, Katherine Clay. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Bergman, Jill. The Motherless Child in the Novels of Pauline Hopkins. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012.
Boyd, Melba Joyce. Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825–1911. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
Brown, Hallie Q. Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Brown, Lois. Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Bryant, Jacqueline K. The Foremother Figure in Early Black Women’s Literature: Clothed in My Right Mind. New York: Garland, 1999.
Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
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Carter, Tomeiko Ashford, ed. Virginia Broughton: The Life and Writings of a National Baptist Missionary. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2010.
Cobb, Jasmine Nichole. “‘Forget Me Not’: Free Black Women and Sentimentality.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 40, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 28–46.
Collins, Julia C. The Curse of Caste; or, The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel. Edited by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Cooper, Valerie C. Word, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible & the Rights of African Americans. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman’s Narrative. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New Introduction and Notes by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gregg Hecimovich. New York: Grand Central Publishing, Hachette Book Group, 2014.
Evans, Stephanie Y. Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850–1954: An Intellectual History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.
Ferguson, SallyAnn H., ed. Nineteenth-Century Black Women’s Literary Emergence: Evolutionary Spirituality, Sexuality, and Identity: An Anthology. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.
Foreman, P. Gabrielle. Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
Foster, Frances Smith. Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746–1892. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
———, ed. Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.
———. “‘You Have No Business to Whip Me’: The Freedom Suits of Polly Wash and Lucy Ann Delaney.” African American Review 41, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 33–50.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman’s Narrative. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.
Giddings, Paula J. Ida: A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching. New York: Amistad, 2008.
Glass, Kathy L. Courting Communities: Black Female Nationalism and “Syncre-Nationalism” in the Nineteenth-Century North. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Grasso, Linda M. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820–1860. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Guy-Sheftall, Beverly. “Black Feminist Studies: The Case of Anna Julia Cooper.” African American Review 43, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 11–15.
———, ed. Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought. New York: The New Press, 1995.
Hall, Stephen G. A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Haynes, Rosetta R. Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011.
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Hopkins, Pauline. The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins: Including Hagar’s Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Hubert, Susan J. “Testimony and Prophecy in The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee,” Journal of Religious Thought 54/55, no. 2/1 (Spring/Fall 1998): 45.
Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Kachun, Mitch. “Juneteenth, Julia Collins and Exploring History: Digging for Lost Stories from a Changing Past.” Journal of the Lycoming County Historical Society (Winter 2010–2011): 9.
Kafka, Phillipa. The Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success Mythologies. New York: Garland, 1993.
King, Wilma. The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women During the Slave Era. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
Lawson, Ellen NicKenzie, and Marlene D. Merrill, eds. The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1984.
Lee, Valerie, ed. The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Women’s Literature. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006.
Lemert, Charles, and Esme Bhan, eds. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including “A Voice from the South” and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998.
Lewis, Janaka B. “Elizabeth Keckley and Freedom’s Labor.” African American Review 49, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 5–17.
Logan, Shirley Wilson. We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.
———, ed. With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African-American Women. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995.
Maffly-Kipp, Laurie F., and Kathryn Lofton, eds. Women’s Work: An Anthology of African-American Women’s Historical Writings from Antebellum America to the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Mance, Ajuan Maria. Inventing Black Women: African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, 1877–2000. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007.
Marable, Manning, and Leith Mullings, eds. Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000.
May, Vivian M. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2007.
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.
Mitchell, Koritha A. “Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama,” in Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture 1877–1919. Edited by Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard. New York: New York University Press, 2006, 210–230.
Moody, Joycelyn. Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003.
Murdy, Anne-Elizabeth. Teach the Nation: Public School, Racial Uplift, and Women’s Writing in the 1890s. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.
Patton, Venetria K. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Pavletich, JoAnn. “Pauline Hopkins and the Death of the Tragic Mulatta.” Callaloo 38, no. 3 (Summer 2015): 647–663.
Peterson, Carla L. “Doers of the Word”: African-American Women Speakers & Writers in the North (1830–1880). New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Potter, Eliza. A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life. Edited by Xiomara Santamarina. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009.
Richardson, Marilyn, ed. Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Robbins, Hollis. Introduction to Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.
———. “Blackening Bleak House: Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative.” In Search of Hannah Crafts. Eds. Gates and Robbins, 71–86. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004.
Rohrbach, A
ugusta. Thinking Outside the Book. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.
———. Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism, and the U.S. Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Samuels, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. “Ain’t I a Symbol?” Review. American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1998): 149–157.
Sherman, Joan. Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1989.
Sklar, Kathryn Kish, and James Brewer Stewart, eds. Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Smith, Valerie. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Stover, Johnnie M. Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.