Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper Lilian Calles Barger (bio) Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. By Brittney C. Cooper. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 208. $95.00 cloth; $19.95 paper; $14.95 ebook) Beyond Respectability by Brittney C. Cooper focuses on "race women" in the decades between 1890 and the 1970s, and challenges the view that these women built a straightjacket of respectability and a culture of dissemblance. Cooper considers the clubwomen of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), Mary Church Terrell and Fannie Barrier Williams, and identifies them as the first generation of self-consciously black women public intellectuals. Moving within the public sphere of racial uplift, they theorized the meaning and possibilities of the black woman's body and encouraged the production of race literature. They offered a challenging intersectional voice to the race men narrative expressed in the W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington ideological binary. While not denying the problems of respectability politics, Cooper reinterprets it as primarily an assertion of "undisputed dignity" challenging the long-standing white "cult of true womanhood" (p. 13). Considering the NACW as a "school of thought," providing the theoretical and political foundations for public race women, Cooper changes the focus from what black women did through the NACW to what they said (p. 16). In four lively written chapters, the author constructs an intellectual [End Page 554] genealogy and surveys the intellectual geography of race women from their speeches, essays, and memoirs. Beginning with the intellectual architects Williams and Terrell, she demonstrates how the NACW went beyond a social welfare organization to constructing ideas for addressing the "civic unknowability" of black women to claim their place as "citizen-women" (pp. 37, 43). Because they suffered social and political erasure through rape and violence, Williams sought to establish the legitimacy and public possibilities for African American women. In the club's "organized anxiety" of shared experience and consciousness of their subordinated position, these thinkers saw a deep link between discourse and embodiment in the black public sphere to which they contributed (p. 33). Through speaking, writing, and political protest Terrell, a protégé of Frederick Douglass, offered a conceptual bridge of "dignified agitation" from earlier uplift politics to the Civil Rights Movement (p. 58). Her memoir Colored Woman in a White World (1940) displays an early sustained reflection on race and gender, lived pain and pleasure, and the presence and absence of black women in the dominant narrative. By using her ability to pass as white, she confronted racial prejudice by drawing attention to her black identity and womanly body in an act of political protest. By making their historically denied bodies visible and exercising their voice Williams and Terrell asserted their public presence. The chapter that places activist and intellectual Pauli Murray within the genealogy of "race women," a concept which remains largely undefined, is less persuasive and appears discontinuous with the NACW school of thought in the previous chapters. Murray's politics were in line with a broad civil rights movement that went beyond race to gender and sex as fluid categories—a position unrecognizable to William and Terrell who asserted the dignity of black womanhood. As a multi-racial female experiencing life-long doubt about her gender identity, Murray was torn about identifying as black or as a woman. As a singular thinker who never resolved her basic identity conflict, she navigated the "disciplining forces of racial heteronormativity" to [End Page 555] engage in her distinct one-person activism of behalf of multiple social movements (p. 106). The designation "race woman" for Murray, a liberal individualist, is ill-fitting. Greater exploration of the thought of Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who along with the black feminist of the 1960s challenged the race man leadership model in the final chapter, would have enriched the text. Beyond Respectability remains an important contribution to growing field of black women's intellectual history and is sure to inspire further inquiry. Cooper has done a great service in bringing to light and identifying the unrecognized intellectual contributions of the NACW school in their theorizing about the political...