Looking for Ladyhood: Desegregation-Era Black Church Feminine-ism and the Ocular Politics of Respectability in R. C. Hickman’s Photographic Archive

More History Than Myth:African American Women's History Since the Publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? Jessica Millward (bio) "History is supposed to give people a sense of identity, a feeling for who they are, and how far they have come. It should act as a springboard for the future. One hopes that it will do this for Black women, who have been given more myth than history." —Deborah Gray White1 At the time of its initial publication in 1985, Ar'n't I a Woman? was among a small, though significant, number of works focusing on the experiences of slave women in the United States.2 Calling critical attention to the world of female slaves, White interrogated stereotypes and historical inaccuracies about bondwomen by highlighting their experiences from childhood to adulthood. At the heart of White's study was the argument that life under bondage fostered an alternative definition of womanhood for African American women.3 Chattel slavery produced life conditions fundamentally separating White and African American women in the United States, prior to and after the Civil War. While White and Black women may have lived under a paternal, patriarchal structure, race-based experiences nonetheless divided them. As the first book focusing entirely on slave women, it is not surprising that Ar'n't I a Woman? continues to be one of the most important books ever produced on the subject. In the two decades since the publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? the study of African American women's history has gained considerable prominence in the American historical canon. African American women's intellectual work, historical contributions, social circumstances, and political participation are noted in countless articles, manuscripts, and dissertations.4 Discussions of African American women's nearly four-hundred-year existence in what became the United States reach back into the colonial era and rush forward into the twenty-first century. Much of this turn in the literature owes a great intellectual debt to questions raised and synthesized in Ar'n't I a Woman? Although White's work centered on slavery, the scholarly questions articulated by White continue to guide the writing of Black women's history in general. In particular, scholars focus their attention on three broad categories: the first being the long-standing debate on race and feminism; the second articulating the relationship between resistance, activism, and power; and the third centering on violence, sexuality, and the body. These topics respond to particular social and historical circumstances such as [End Page 161] slavery, emancipation, and welfare reform; however, they are not historically specific. Rather, they are salient currents in the dialogue between the myths surrounding African American women and their actual lived histories in the United States. Pervasive stereotypes about African American womanhood permeate social, political, and economic realities in the twenty-first century and inspire scholars to aggressively dismantle the notion that all Black women fit into one of three categories presented by White: the asexual mammy, the hot-tempered sapphire, and the wonton jezebel. In doing so, the canon of studies produced in the generations after Ar'n't I a Woman? highlights the multiplicity of African American women's identities in the United States. Race and Feminism Feminism(s), like the writing of Black women's history, is multilayered. Just as scholars realize that a taxonomy of differences based on class, educational attainment, and political orientation orders relationships between African American and White women, they also produce differences among Black women. Thus for historians of African American women, articulating the relationship between feminism and the writing of Black women's history is as challenging now as it was for White in 1985. White found that Black women came to their protofeminist consciousness through lived experiences in bondage. Slave women did not have access to such formal institutional frameworks as the church and educational settings. Rather they fashioned a distinct worldview that aided them as they negotiated their new lives after the Civil War. Thus while White women endured their own "race-determined sexism," writing African American women's history forces scholars to investigate how race determines their feminist consciousness.5 The African American community...

In this essay I consider major themes in the scholarly treatment of African American women's religious history and explore how particular emphases in the broader field of African American religious history have marginalized women's experiences and contributions. I argue that mobilizing African American women's religious history and placing it at the center of our historical inquiry allows us to interrogate themes and foci that structure the accepted narrative of African American religious history. Moving beyond an approach that simply adds women to that accepted story, I suggest ways in which examining African American women's religious experiences might open up rich areas for research and new ways of conceiving the very shape of the field.

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in Antebellum City. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. 212. Cloth, $55.00)Reviewed by Rita ReynoldsThe history of African American women has evolved over past 25 years at a relatively slow pace when compared with African American history in general. Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in Plantation South, published in 1985 (New York), was one of first books to consider African American slave women as scholarly subjects in their own right. Jean Yellin Fagan's efforts to prove Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl was fact and not abolitionist fiction validated Jacobs's work as historical document. Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family from Slavery to Present (New York, 2009) did much to unravel dynamics of race, class, and gender for laboring black women in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In like manner Catherine Clinton reevaluated complexities of life for domestic southern slave women and for wealthy white women whose seemingly neverending needs they tended to in antebellum South.Erica Armstrong Dunbar explores how African American women in Philadelphia experienced transformation from slaves to free women of color beginning in colonial period to Civil War. Dunbar builds on solid historical scholarship on Philadelphia's free people of color by Julie Winch and Gary Nash, to name just two. But what makes this work different is its focus on what Dunbar calls regular slave and free black women of period (2).Dunbar's main argument is that, as freedom came in degrees to slave women who were last to truly experience benefits of freedom, 19th century Philadelphia served as a rehearsal for emancipation in post-Civil War era across nation (3). By using black women's friendship albums, church records, labor contracts, and personal correspondences, Dunbar is able to tell story of both wealthy literate and impoverished illiterate black women in a logical, well-documented, and convincingly argued manner.Dunbar's relatively short volume does a great deal to reconstruct gendered world in which antebellum urban black women struggled. She begins with economic and political importance of slavery in colonial Pennsylvania and argues that while Pennsylvania was considered the best poor man's country, Quakers, regardless of their religious beliefs, relied on slave labor. When Peculiar Institution came to an end during early national period Africans and African Americans moved toward a new kind of unfree labor - indentured servitude. Black women suffered greatest hardship because those born before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for life, and their children born after that date would remain in bondage for not more than 28 years. …

This essay examines the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (IFCWC) campaign to operate a house for African American women at the University of Iowa from 1919 to 1950. (1) It seeks to add to a growing body of literature which focuses on African American philanthropy and collective black economic enterprises. An examination of the experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa and the IFCWC Home campaign offers an interesting case study that builds on recent research work on African American Women's philanthropy. (2) The IFCWC's economic enterprise developed because between 1913 and 1946, the University of Iowa barred African American students from campus and some student activities. The experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa are unique for two reasons: 1) the house they occupied was one of a few dormitories in the nation owned and operated by a formally organized group of African American women; and 2) the campaign to maintain the IFCWC Hom e provided mostly middle-class African American women students with the organizational, intellectual, and leadership skills necessary to become the next generation of black women activists. In general, the experiences of African American college women at predominantly white coeducational institutions in the early twentieth century are unique because white women often had the guidance and support of white women administrators and/or faculty. (3) African American women, on the other hand, had to look outside the university for such mentors and role models. The question remains then, how did the alliance with the IFCWC help to keep students connected to the African American community; and how did the community respond? How did limited employment prospects that resulted from race and gender prejudice help to bring about a sharply focused movement to make a college education available to a number of Iowa's young African American women? I contend that the IFCWC prepared African American women at the University of I owa to assume positions of leadership in organizations such as the IFCWC, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a host of other local and regional civil rights organizations. (4) Upon graduation, these women also assumed responsibilities in their local communities in their effort to the race. This work places African American women's lives at the center of inquiry in a preexisting historiographical paradigm which often excludes them through a preoccupation with African American men and white women. A few scholars, such as Linda Perkins, Elizabeth Ihle, Jeanne Noble, and Ellen Lawson, have completed various studies on African American women's higher education. Other scholars, such as Amy Thompson McCandless, offer thorough and insightful comparisons of the southern white and southern black women's education in the twentieth century. Outside the works by this small group of historians, the experiences of college educated African American women have been marginal. Particularly missing from current studies is any examination of African American women in the midwest. (5) Although African American women's historiography has recently focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, these works avoid any elaborate discussions of African American women's history in midwestern states west of the Mississippi River su ch as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. (6) To be sure, this study is not only specific to Iowa, but to African American women who attended the University of Iowa. I contend that racism did not paralyze these women's struggle for equality. They transformed their experiences with racism into a call for social activism, racial uplift, and service to their communities. (7) As Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw and other scholars point out, although African Americans agreed on the ideal of uplift they did not always agree on what types of behavior were appropriate. …

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

After Josephine Beckwith and DeLaris Johnson broke the color barrier at two southern missionary training schools in the 1940s and 50s, their religious vocations led them and other African American women on a trajectory of missionary service resonate with what we recognize today as civil rights activism. While histories of African American women's mission organizing and those of their civil rights organizing typically are framed as separate endeavors, this article teases out the previously unexamined overlaps and connections between black women's missionary efforts and civil rights activism in the 1940s and 50s. In doing so, it bridges a disjuncture in African American women's religious history, illuminating the ways beliefs about Christian mission shaped the community work of black missionary women so that narratives of civil rights organizing and Christian missions are no longer discrete categories but are seen in historical continuity. In shedding light on the ways mission organizing and service served as a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism, a new vision and practice of mission for the civil rights era is revealed and our understandings of the religious lives and activism of African American women are greatly enriched and expanded.

Teaching Ar'n't I a Woman? Daina Ramey Berry (bio) Each spring semester, I begin my African American women's history class with images of black women from the seventeenth century to the present.1 Students squirm in their seats because the first few slides depict enslaved women in coffles being transported to slave ships. Images of half-naked bondwomen, with agonizing facial expressions, exposed breasts, and children clinging to their ankles, shock the students. Some cringe when the next slide appears. Pictured is an enslaved woman forced to her knees, her arms twisted behind her, while two men stamp a hot iron rod on her shoulder to brand the initials of a slave-trading firm or slaveholder. Moving forward to the twentieth century, students seem relieved to see the familiar image of Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind.2 No more naked bodies, they think; no more distressing photographs. Yet this stereotype is in some ways equally disturbing. I begin this course the same way Deborah Gray White opened Ar'n't I a Woman?—by debunking the myths, stereotypes, and misconceptions of enslaved women as the promiscuous Jezebel, the angry Sapphire, or the loyal Mammy. "In antebellum America," White explained, "the female slave's chattel status, sex, and race combined to create a complicated set of myths about black womanhood": one "carnal, the other maternal."3 I have been amazed by the way students seem comfortable with the Mammy stereotype. "Jezebel," on the other hand, is more difficult for them to discern because it means that they have to consider the sexual exploitation of enslaved women, which makes many students uncomfortable. The Sapphire stereotype, at least for most students, is represented by the domineering black woman they saw in such 1970s television characters as Esther from Sanford and Son or Florence from The Jeffersons. Reflecting on her work in the 1999 revised edition, White noted that "there is now more history than myth" when it comes to our understanding of enslaved women.4 For two decades, scholars have used Ar'n't I a Woman? in survey and seminar courses, enabling students to think about the institution of slavery from a female perspective. In addition to how I have used the book in the classroom, this essay also discusses some of the reasons it remains the premier book adopted in history and African American, women, and gender studies courses at institutions of higher learning. Ar'n't I a Woman? is an instructive tool that I have used and relied on to teach the history of slavery from a gendered perspective. [End Page 139] The first time I assigned this book was in an undergraduate survey course on African American history. I opened the class with the following questions: What was the role of women in West African communities, during the transatlantic slave trade, on board the slavers crossing the Atlantic, and in colonial and antebellum America? Students were stumped because they had not considered that women's experiences differed from men's. They had not considered how a lactating mother had to take care of an infant during the middle passage; how a woman who had recently given birth had to labor in the tobacco, cotton, and rice fields of Virginia, Georgia, or South Carolina; or how women and men employed different resistance strategies. They came to class with the assumption that the enslaved experience was universal. Soon, however, White's scholarship pushed them to consider the lives of enslaved females. Students read Ar'n't I a Woman? in conjunction with Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In their midterm papers, they discussed the ways in which women and men experienced slavery based on these three readings. Many of them argued, as Harriet Jacobs poignantly expressed in her narrative, that "slavery was terrible for men, but far more terrible for women."5 They analyzed legal cases on Lexis-Nexis that involved bondwomen. Some wrote about the methods enslaved women used to cope with slavery.6 Some organized their essays around the life cycle of female slavery as White...

"StrangeLove": Searchingfor Sexual Subjectivities in Black PrintPopular Cultureduringthe 1950s Leisa D. Meyer Myrtle Hartgrove, Atlanta, GA—Dear Editor: I just finished glanc ing through your first issue of Tan Confessions, and frankly I feel that you've gone to a lot of trouble to waste a lot of valuable paper. What is the point behind the whole thing? Those stories that you call "true to life," are simply impossible. No self-respecting woman with an ounce of decency would allow any of those things to happen to her that you have published as "the truth." You should be ashamed to advertise such trash on the same page with such honorable publi cations as Ebony and Negro Digest. Jane White, Los Angeles, CA—Dear Editor: Thanks a lot for coming out with your new magazine, Tan Confessions. I am a long time buyer of romantic magazines and while I know that they are trash I would much rather spend my money for "colored trash" than "white trash."1 The disparate reactions of myrtle hartgrove and jane white to the firstissue of Tan Confessions indicate that the sexuality rendered in this monthly publication's intimate stories was deeply contested ter rain for African American readers. I seek in this essay to analyze more broadly such contestations, drawing on a range of articles, letters, and responses in black popular culture magazines in the period immedi ately following World War II. Through an interrogation of the negoti ations among individuals and within groups, we can see the complex and diverse sexual subjectivities (or potential subjectivities) of African American women as they are articulated, debated, weighed, explored, FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 625 626 Leisa D. Meyer reconfigured, and at times, rejected. What becomes clear through this material is that while there was an explicit and often direct engage ment with white normative cultural presumptions concerning Afri can American sexuality, there were also alternative racialized sexual subjectivities that were explicitly proposed, discussed, and debated within these pages. Myrtle Hartgrove's comments hold up the "decent" and "self respecting" woman as a bulwark against the "trash"—stories of black women's romantic and sexual encounters — offered in the pages of Tan Confessions. Hartgrove's invocation of respectability guards against the longstanding racist trope of hypersexuality and its concomitant insinuation that African American women are not "respectable."2 Many African American women refuted the racist hypersexual image in order to protect themselves and their daughters from its conse quences and also to assert desire and claim their sexuality and sexual subjectivity. Hartgrove here engages in a "politics of respectability"— historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's oft-cited phrase describing African American women's promotion of restrained behavior, espe cially restrained sexual behavior, as a "strategy of reform" during the early twentieth century. For Higginbotham, this strategy enabled African American women to "define themselves outside the param eters of prevailing racist discourses."3 Historian Paisley Harris on the other hand has critiqued this strategy and its consequences, charac terizing the politics of respectability as having a "gatekeeping func tion" that established a "behavioral entrance fee" for membership in African American communities. While this "entrance fee" offered some challenge to hegemonic cultural views of African Americans, it also constructed and maintained status distinctions within African American communities.4 Subsequent studies of African American women's lives and sex ualities have expanded this understanding of the "gatekeeping func tion" of respectability beyond the particular historical moment that Higginbotham explores. As Michele Mitchell suggests in her essay on African American women's history, it is "important to ponder whether African Americanists who theorize gender and sexuality have fomented new silences." She goes on to note her "lurking suspicions" that "certain subjects are avoided because they have been deemed Leisa D. Meyer 627 either dangerous or damaging" and voices her "uneasfe] about the costs attached to this particular quiet."5 Literary scholar Matt Richardson also speaks to the problems of these silences in African American history: The tradition of representing Black people as decent and moral his torical agents has meant the erasure of the broad array of Black sex uality and gendered being in favor of a...

Homes On-the-Road, Terrorized Cabins, and Prophetic Nightmare-scapesEmma J. Ray's Unsettling Western Fantasies Shelly Jarenski (bio) Despite almost thirty years of scholarship on women's experience in the mythic West of the United States, scholarship that began in many ways with Annette Kolodny's The Land Before Her, the frontier myth continues to conjure gendered notions of pioneerism, nonconformity, and adventure. Even when the gendered aspects of this myth are challenged, the American West that most people imagine is still inherently white. In many ways the story of African American women's experience as agents in one of the most palpable fantasies of American belonging has been obscured or erased.1 This erasure has given us an inaccurate sense of both the United States' and African American history. As Eric Gardner's recent work has powerfully documented, this erasure has also given us a truncated definition of African American literary history, one that is limited to the long-form stories of enslaved and ex-enslaved people in rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, as Kolodny argues, it has caused the prevailing fantasy of the United States' frontier to be one of "privatized erotic mastery" rather than one of a "home and familial human community within a cultivated garden" (xiii); and, to extend Kolodny, the dominance of one fantasy over the other has fueled realities of genocide and environmental exploitation. Finally, this erasure has limited our perceptions of who belongs in the nation's narratives, defining who gets to be a "real American" and who does not. However, placing African American women's narratives at the center of our study of American western literature presents a counternarrative to the mythic West by re-centering feminized ideologies of community, care, and cooperation into the pioneer fantasy, [End Page 381] including reimagining these feminized ideologies into environmental relationships. Re-centering African American women's narratives of the West also shifts African American literary history, extending it beyond rural southern and urban northeastern geographies. And, of course, re-centering African American women's narratives in our study of American western literature allows us to reimagine national belonging. This essay aims to unsettle some of our conceptions of belonging, and of the West, by studying the 1926 memoir of Seattle-based, formerly enslaved evangelical reformer and itinerant preacher Emma J. Ray, titled Twice Sold, Twice Ransomed: Autobiography of Mr. and Mrs. L. P. Ray.2 Although Ray's narrative conforms to masculine aspects of the frontier fantasy at times, more often it breaks with those norms by positing decidedly feminized ideals of resistance and coming of age. For example, Ray and her husband, L. P., find their second freedom—that is, salvation—by conforming to the norms of temperance, service, and grace. Also, Ray transitions from a meek, passive, and placating woman at the beginning of the narrative to an outspoken leader by the end, and she does so through her reliance on Black, often female, communities of piety, such as the Colored Women's Christian Temperance Union and Methodist tent revivals, rather than through any kind of isolationist self-reliance or trials with the landscape. Ray's coming of age in the midst of communities is a reversal of the "solitary Black westerner" stereotype defined by Quintard Taylor as "a solitary figure loosened from moorings of family, home, and community" (qtd. in Johnson 11). Ray's reversal and resituation of this stereotype is crucial for the way we imagine race as well as gender, as Michael Johnson argues that this figure functions imaginatively to "transcen[d] race in part by separating himself from the black (eastern) community to become a member of white (western) society" (11). Ray's coming of age is instead embedded in western, Black, religious communities led by women. In addition to these racialized and feminized modes of resistance, Ray deploys three connected, deeply unsettling themes in her autobiography: mobility, domesticity, and the environmental imaginary. These themes were of crucial importance to those people who were held in bondage's post-emancipation realities, and they have [End Page 382] special resonance for women in the context of the mythic West. These themes are unsettling in Ray...

Whites Only: Race and Mobility in Kym Ragusa's <i>The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging</i> and Claudia Rankine's <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>

Challenging Dissemblance in Pauli Murray Historiography, Sketching a History of the Trans New Negro

Walter Earl Fluker, <i>The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America</i>. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Pp. 304. $30.00 (cloth).

An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia Lisa Krissoff Boehm (bio) Lisa Levenstein . A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xvi + 199 pages. Illustrations, tables, maps, appendix, bibliography, and index. $35.96. This work, a part of the prestigious John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, edited by Waldo E. Martin and Patricia Sullivan, makes a noteworthy contribution to the growing yet still underserved field of African American women's urban history. Levenstein's work is heartening on a number of levels, and we need more scholars to consider undertaking projects of this type. As I have argued in the Journal of Urban History's special January 2010 edition on teaching ("Adding Gender to American Urban History"), urban historians ought to produce works that cross subfields with greater frequency. Urban historians tend to craft books aimed at a narrow audience and seem hesitant to make theoretical or narrative leaps between genres. This hesitancy denies the field greater readership and historiographical impact. Urban history can be successfully merged with political, economic, environmental, gender, labor, immigration, African American, and other types of history. A Movement Without Marches is simultaneously a book about poverty, African American women, public policy, and postwar Philadelphia. The book openly draws inspiration from the likes of Thomas Sugrue's Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (1996) and Arnold R. Hirsch's Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1840-1960 (1998). Levenstein makes a very important contribution by studying what she terms "the gendered construction of racialized urban poverty" (p. 5). Levenstein writes about African American women in poverty, a topic that has proved onerous for many academics due to the stereotypes that must be confronted. Levenstein rejects the term "underclass," which "not only paints a false portrait of poor women's goals and values, but it also severely misconstrues their work habits. Regardless of their employment status, women who sought and retained assistance from public institutions were workers, first and foremost, because they labored to care for their households and [End Page 556] their families with few financial resources" (p. 24). Levenstein is upfront about addressing the ways in which the women may have exhibited traits commonly attributed to the underclass, admitting that the women "received public assistance, became pregnant unintentionally, suffered from depression, or used drugs and alcohol" (p. 24). Levenstein could point out here that these traits can be applied to a broad number of Americans—middle class as well as working class—especially when one considers how many Americans have relied on unemployment assistance at some time in their lives or made use of child tax credits or other financial relief. The author notes on page twenty-six that any study of African American women in poverty runs the risk of misinterpretation, given the broad range of negative stereotypes attributed to these women. The nature of the book necessitates a thorough exploration of the women's personal lives, and the author must divulge some unflattering stories. Extensive reliance on court records unearths very sensitive tales; however, Levenstein approaches her work with the utmost sensitivity and need not worry about being misinterpreted. In a clearly prepared table, Levenstein notes how the black population of Philadelphia expanded from 219,599 in 1930 to 529,239 by 1960. Much of this notable increase is due to the movement known as the Second Great Migration, which Levenstein does not refer to by name but mentions fleetingly in a few places in the book. The economic, cultural, and political aspects of the city that lured hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to settle there ought to be contrasted with the startling conditions the migrants encountered in their daily lives in Philadelphia. As return migration remained low, the North must have remained preferable in some ways. Migration studies and narratives, although there are relatively few focused strictly on women, have been a staple of postwar urban and African American history and ought to be further incorporated into this work. Reference to the conclusions of sociologist Stewart Tolnay, who refutes...

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar