Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture

Abstract

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture Erica Richardson (bio) Carefully and conscientiously we shall study the questions, which affect the race most deeply and directly. Against the convict lease system, the Jim Crow car laws, lynchings and all other barbarities which degrade us, we shall protest with such force of logic and intensity of the soul that those who oppress us will either cease to disavow the inalienability and equality of human rights, or be ashamed to openly violate the very principles upon which this government was founded. —Mary Church Terrell, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play” (1902)1 The immorality of colored women is a theme upon which those who know little about them or those who maliciously misrepresent them love to descant. Foul aspersions upon the character of colored women are assiduously circulated by the press of certain sections and especially by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradation of their female slaves […] Dotted all over the country are charitable institutions for the aged, orphaned, and poor which have been established by colored women, just how many it is [End Page 33] difficult to state, owing to the lack of statistics bearing on the progress, possessions, and prowess of colored women. —Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women” (1904)2 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black middle-class women around the United States formed a series of clubs to mobilize a racial uplift reform movement. They created kindergartens and reading groups.3 They encouraged and guided the cultivation of black homes. And above all else, black clubwomen, as they came to be known, worked tirelessly to address the myriad challenges the black race faced with the rollback of civil rights following the end of Reconstruction and the steady rise of racial prejudice and antiblack violence.4 By way of introduction into this essay’s focus on the archive of black clubwomen’s public writing and print culture, I offer a reading of the two passages above by Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was one of the most influential and powerful black women’s club leaders and the first president of the national network of black clubwomen, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In the first selection above, taken from a speech delivered to a meeting of black clubwomen, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play,” Terrell draws on a series of issues related to the social realities for black Americans. The convict lease system practically undermined the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Jim Crow train cars vacated the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring equal rights to blacks as citizens, and lynchings negated perhaps all of the Reconstruction amendments, threatening black death in response to any semblance of black life and equality, from voting rights to the sheer attempt at black dignity. Terrell illustrates the social and political awareness of black clubwomen, but it is her carefully crafted sentimental tone that captures my attention for it indicates an ability to refashion epistemological tools to assert black women’s authority and agency. For example, when Terrell proclaims black clubwomen’s potential to intervene “with such force of logic and intensity of the soul,” she aligns reason with spirituality, effectively combining two categories of thought and knowledge production typically regarded as mutually exclusive during the period.5 Victorian middle-class women were given province over the home, emotions, and care of the family, but rarely were they perceived as mobilizing a set of politics based on their intellectual abilities. Black women were often excluded from this cultural standard due to race. Terrell combines logic and the soul to assert black women’s ability to meet a middle-class standard and to give them greater authority to perceive, think, and reimagine black social and political life not only for the benefit of blacks but also for the substantiation of “the inalienability and equality of human rights.” And yet, as the second selection suggests, that was not enough to persuade American society to recognize what black clubwomen knew of their...