‘Chicago’s Renaissance woman’: the life, activism, and diasporic cultural feminism of Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the life of Dr. Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs, a teacher, writer, artist, and public historian who founded Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History in 1961. Throughout her life, Burroughs used art, education, and public history to forge a distinct brand of diasporic cultural feminism that linked Chicago to the African world. I use this term to elucidate the transnational and intersectional feminist consciousness of Burroughs, who rejected perceptions of black women as sexually promiscuous, reshaped dominant practices of respectability through her art and travel, and emphasized connections among racial, gender, and class oppression in diasporic terms. As a theoretical framework, diasporic cultural feminism extends the geographical scope of the African diaspora to include the Midwest, demonstrates how black women were authoritative progenitors of black internationalist thought, and illuminates how race, space, and gender shaped diasporic politics in Chicago.