Nineteenth-century African American Women Research Articles

Seduction's Offspring: Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells

Seduction's Offspring:Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells Sarah Sillin (bio) The story of American sentimentalism is one of literary bequest, wherein eighteenth-century seduction novels passed an aesthetic legacy down to nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Both pervasive genres relate stories about the need for American girls to restrain their passions and feel for others, punctuated by thick descriptions of characters' affect. Given this shared emphasis on how feeling shapes local and national communities, critics often interrogate sentimentalism's politics. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins famously debated whether the mode's valorization of suffering and sympathy proves conservative or progressive.1 Further, critics have explored the political stakes of sentimentalism's turn from seduction novels to domestic fiction and what that turn suggests about American culture. Does the shift from seduction novels' unruly desire to domestic fiction's well-regulated sympathy signal that women were gaining power to foster national cohesion (Baym)? Or did antebellum fiction perpetuate demands that women subordinate their own desires to serve the community (Barnes)? Meanwhile, Laura Romero argued that sentimental texts often integrate "radical" views (for instance, on gender or class) with "reactionary" stances (say, on race); thus, we would do well to consider how sentimentalism's turn affected various groups, such as white and black women, in disparate ways (4). In response to these uneven effects, a number of nineteenth-century writers entwine conventions of both genres to offer divergent views on sentimentalism's legacy.2 This essay argues that tensions in sentimentalism proved generative for nineteenth-century African American women writers who rethink familiar portraits of the shift from the seduction plot to domestic fiction. Prior scholarship elucidates how African American writers blend genres to create space for black voices. Slave narratives often play on sentimental conventions to claim authority for and direct readers' sympathy to enslaved peoples (F. Foster; Carby). Likewise, midcentury African American novels interweave autobiography and fiction to question whose discourse readers recognize as authentic (Andrews 24). We can see this engagement with slave narratives and sentimentalism in one of the first novels by an African American woman: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Scholars demonstrate that Wilson draws on sentimental conventions as rewritten in slave narratives (Carby 45) to fictionalize elements of her own life via a protagonist who resembles sentimental heroines and enslaved women (Peterson). Wilson found that the "sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings" of "white sentimental novels," "did not match [her] … constant struggle" (Gates and Wilson lix). In other words, she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls postsentimentalism: work that rethinks the mode's conventions by refusing to sublimate "subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy" (655). Sentimentalism often conflates all forms of pain and then redirects sympathy toward the privileged (Berlant 641). In contrast, Wilson questions whether powerful white women merit sympathy, given that claims of white moral sensibility mask antiblack violence. Beyond suggesting that the critiques that would define postsentimentalism emerged alongside sentimentalism, Wilson demonstrates that comedy can play a [End Page 277] vital role in such affective resistance. By entwining sentimental conventions with humor, she unsettles this mode's fantasy that benevolence superseded intemperate feeling. Nina Baym argues that antebellum writers of "woman's fiction" rejected sentimentalism that expressed "private, excessive, undisciplined, self-centered emotionality" (as in the seduction novel), while celebrating sentimentalism that reflected "Enlightenment advocacy of philanthropy and benevolence" (xxix, xxx). Wilson, however, satirizes these forms for their shared narratives of white feminine virtue that obscure African Americans' pleasure and pain.3 The white fallen woman's desires foster violence, rendering her undeserving of sympathy; Wilson invites readers to identify instead with her irreverently funny African American protagonist.4 Although antebellum culture valorized well-regulated sympathy, the illicit desires of the seduction plot did not dwindle away; instead, they became a nest egg, accruing interest in the domestic sphere.5 Wilson suggests that the white fallen woman and republican mother spend their unruly feelings in violent displays of power as they project their sins onto an African American girl. This rewriting elucidates a criticism that African American writers would level at sentimentalism across the nineteenth century: the...

Leaving Husband, Home, and Baby and All: African American Women and Nineteenth-Century Global Missions

ABSTRACT By profiling the lives of three nineteenth-century African American women missionaries (Eliza Davis George, Emma Beard Delaney, and Florence Spearing Randolph) this article attends to three major themes: (1) broadening and complicating our understanding of the intersections of race and gender in world missions, (2) examining the theological and secular motivations for African American women’s ministerial labors, and (3) suggesting how nineteenth-century African American missionary women may still provide a model for contemporary service in world missions.

Reconstructing Subversive Moral Discourses in the Spiritual Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Preaching Women

Using the spiritual autobiographies of selected nineteenth-century African American women, this inquiry reveals how these women constructed subversive discourses as moral actors and social reformers, even in the midst of religious, racial and gender oppression. Cuffee argues that their discursive self-assertion involved them in transformative acts that moved them from the status of marginalized survivors of white supremacy and chattel slavery to empowered, moral subjects at the intersection of religion, race, gender, and identity ideologies. This article examines how these women appropriated biblical rhetoric, abolitionist ideals, and the Protestant evangelical conversion and sanctification doctrine to realign themselves in opposition to and in disruption of dominant stereotypes and negative perceptions about their race and gender to liberate themselves from hegemonic structures, as well as to sustain them in their preaching missions and gender-justice protests.

Maria W. Stewart’s “The First Stage of Life”: Black Girlhood in theRepository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art

“The First Stage of Life” (1861) is a six-page short story by Maria W. Stewart, African American woman writer, orator, and activist. It is serialized in three parts in the Repository of Religion and Literature, and of Science and Art in April, July, and October 1861. From 1858 to 1863, the Repository was a black magazine administered by black men and designed for black readers. It was based in Indianapolis, and in 1861 its chief editor was John Mifflin Brown. Published quarterly with each edition containing just over twenty bound pages of poems, parables, and essays, the magazine attracted black households with rising amounts of disposable income and leisure time. Today, the Repository is a non-circulating, non-digitized, rare black magazine on microfilm at the Indiana State Library with one extant issue housed in Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Stewart’s serialized story about a black girl’s coming-of-age published in an early black magazine broadens the contributions African American women have made to nineteenth-century print culture, and her early emphasis on black girlhood invites further study on the methodologies, frameworks, and emerging trends that continue to shape the canon of early African American literature and print culture. This article explores what we gain by examining the intersection of black girlhood and black print culture studies. To define black girlhood, nineteenth-century African American women writers distinguish between youthful and knowing girlhood, a demarcation that is represented by a black girl’s age and offers rhetorical advantages for race activists. Identifying black girls as youthful and therefore childlike removes sexual suggestion from their bodies. The growth from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood occurs when black girls gain a deepened awareness of their precarious positions and seek methods for their survival. To emphasize a black girl’s age as a textual marker recognizes that, similar to all women, black women in the antebellum period experience a youthful period and undergo distinct stages of growth and maturity into

The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis: A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country

Tiya Miles NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 88 Notes from the Field TIYA MILES The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis A Troubling Case of Gender and Race in Creek Country IN THE LATE 1990s, I was casting about for a dissertation topic in the subject area of nineteenth-century African American and Native American women’s history when I noticed a pattern of black women’s assertive activities in Muskogee Creek communities of present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Oklahoma. A few of the women who caught my eye moved out of slavery by marrying into Creek families. A couple of the women became hoteliers in Indian Territory at a time when neither Native nor white women were doing the same. And one of these women of African descent, a young adolescent, was distinguished as an extraordinary pupil at the first mission school in the Creek nation. I considered writing a dissertation about the composite experience of these African American women in the context of Creek society. However, upon realizing that the source material was extremely sparse, I set aside this topic and instead located my work within Cherokee society, where I concentrated on the experiences of enslaved blacks and Afro-Cherokee tribal members. Nevertheless, there was one person I had uncovered among the population of black women living in Creek communities who never left my imagination. This was Mary Ann Battis, a teenaged girl of Creek, black, and white ancestry, whose residency at the Alabama-based Asbury Mission School in the 1820s became a point of controversy for Battis, her family members, Protestant missionaries, and a U.S. Indian Agent. According to the Methodist administrators and teachers at the school, Battis chose to remain in the Southeast with them while her own mother, uncle, and siblings emigrated west with other Creeks during the Indian removal period. It took the intervention of Thomas McKenney, head of Indian affairs in the War Department, to settle the conflict. When I first encountered this story as a graduate student, it struck me as unusual that an Indigenous young woman would refuse the requests of her mother and uncle (who in Creek matrilineal kinship terms would have been like a father) to relocate with them in favor of staying behind with white mis- NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 The Lost Letter of Mary Ann Battis 89 sionaries. I pursued the matter and found that two historians had offered varying interpretations of Battis’s choice. Adele Logan Alexander, author of Ambiguous Lives, a lyrical history on free women of color in Georgia, had concluded that “Battis was raised a Christian and apparently felt a strong kinship with the settlers’ community because she remained at the Moravian [sic] mission near Milledgeville and chose not to go West when others in her tribe were forced out of Georgia.” In Alexander’s interpretation, Battis’s was an act of loyalty to “the missionaries who had raised her” and to “her own religious devotion.”1 Daniel F. Littlefield, a prolific chronicler of African American and Five Tribe Indian relations, argued in his book Africans and Creeks that Battis was a pawn in the political maneuverings between Indian Agent David Brearley, who was charged with overseeing Creek removal, and the missionary couple who had already lost students to this policy.2 While I admired the work of ­ Alexander and Littlefield, I was not fully satisfied with the explanations about Battis’s life that they had teased from the (admittedly) stingy historical record. Alexander had assumed an acculturative identity as the main push factor for Battis, while Littlefield had attributed the conflict to the white actors and allowed Battis’s own viewpoint to drop out of his analysis. I wondered at the time what might be uncovered about the intersectional dynamics of race, gender, and religion in Creek communities if Battis’s motivation were examined more closely. It would take more than a decade, though, for me to attempt such an examination. I have found through a renewal of my research on Mary Ann Battis that her story was even more unusual than I had perceived all those years ago—unusual enough for a key document in the case, Battis’s...

Radical Spiritual Motherhood, Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women. By Rosetta R. Haynes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 236 pp. $39.95 cloth.

Radical Spiritual Motherhood, Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women. By Rosetta R. Haynes. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011. 236 pp. $39.95 cloth. - Volume 82 Issue 1

Preface

Preface Laura L. Knoppers (bio) In Paradise Lost, book 9, the tragic tension of the Fall is punctuated by black comedy as a newly fallen Adam, jocular and slightly tipsy, praises Eve’s sagacity, wishes that for one forbidden tree there had been ten, and eyes his comely bride with new interest: For never did thy Beautie since the dayI saw thee first and wedded thee, adorn’dWith all perfections, so enflame my senseWith ardor to enjoy thee, fairer nowThen ever, bountie of this vertuous Tree.1 As scholars have sometimes noted, Adam’s speech echoes an equally memorable moment in the Iliad, when a smitten Zeus propositions a seemingly reluctant Hera, who has in fact intentionally come perfumed, decked out, and armed with the girdle of Aphrodite to distract her husband from the battlefield of Troy.2 Like Zeus, Adam boasts of his newfound ardor, although unlike Zeus he does not praise his wife by cataloguing the other beautiful women who have aroused his desire and produced his numerous illegitimate offspring. This would not normally be the best way to flatter the jealous Hera, but she turns a blind eye, keeping her focus on getting Zeus into bed and, with the aid of Sleep, put away for the night. The humorous and parodic intertext of the duped and deceived Zeus and the scheming Hera helps to distinguish between the [End Page vii] Miltonic scenes of prelapsarian and postlapsarian lovemaking that C. S. Lewis famously objected were too much alike: “[Milton] has made the unfallen already so voluptuous and kept the fallen still so poetical that the contrast is not so sharp as it ought to have been.”3 The Olympian and Edenic husbands take their eye off the ball, so to speak: for Zeus, the field at Troy where Poseidon has come to the aid of Hera’s beloved Greeks, pinned back against their ships, and for Adam, the goal of obedience about which he has repeatedly reminded Eve, as well as the goal of being Eve’s guide and head. Neither marital pair retires decorously, whether to Olympus or to the Edenic bower; Zeus and Hera embrace atop Mount Ida, covered by a golden cloud, while Adam and Eve head for the nearest shady bank. This moment of heightened desire for Adam and Eve is also a moment of heightened intertextuality, of overlapping stories and storytellers, of breaking boundaries between sacred and profane spaces, of transgressive bodies and excessive desire. The episode serves in miniature to highlight some of the current topics in Milton scholarship with which the contributors to this volume engage. In this issue of Milton Studies, our authors bring fresh and probing insights to Milton and storytelling, embodied experience and transgression of boundaries, divine and human relations, and intertextual echo, allusion, and appropriation. The Milton that they examine is fully immersed in literary, cultural, and religious history: shaped by, appropriating, and reworking humoral physiology, monism, classical and medieval philosophy, Reformation theology, classical epic, religious and political polemic, and the Book of Common Prayer. The Milton explored in these essays looks back to the Bible, Homer, Virgil, Aristotle, Augustine, and Lucretius; his works jostle alongside those of such contemporaries as Swiss reformer Johannes Wollebius; tolerationists Lord Brook, Henry Robinson, and William Walwyn; and King Charles I himself; and they resonate forward to the writings of nineteenth century African-American women and of modern-day postsecularism. These Miltonic texts imitate, reprise, and challenge, but they are also marked by process, ambivalence, tension, and inconsistencies, [End Page viii] by angelic stories that do not add up, by gendered song that both expresses and endangers chastity, by boundaries meant to be transgressed, by inclusion that necessarily excludes, by iconoclasm that both tears down and builds up. Like the Homeric gods, the Miltonic narrative can move from reverence, dignity, and power to the absurd and satiric and back again. Opening our first section, “Storytelling and Authorship,” N. K. Sugimura looks at differing, even conflicting, models of causation, as the stories that angels tell in Paradise Lost move between a time-based, linear causation and an alternative Augustinian model of extratemporal causality. Timothy M. Harrison examines the...

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities

Style, Gender, and Fantasy in Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Writing Radical Spiritual Motherhood: Autobiography and Empowerment in Nineteenth-Century African American Women Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road: American Mobilities

Sowing Seeds in an Untilled Field: Temperance and Race, Indeterminacy and Recovery in Frances E. W. Harper's Sowing and Reaping

[Woman's] individuality must be recognized before the evils of intemperance can cease to exist. How absurd the idea--how degrading the idea that woman, before marriage, can enjoy freedom of thought; but afterward that she must endorse her husband's sentiments, be they good or bad. Call you not this slavery? Amelia Bloomer In an 1853 speech to temperance proponents in New York's Metropolitan Hall, Amelia Bloomer directly connected women's temperance mission to female subordination. (1) Authors often equated intemperance and women's oppression with slavery without recognizing how disingenuous such symbolic comparisons were. Of course, the realities of slavery in the South and nominal freedom in the North belied such equations. troubled relationship between the mainstream temperance movement and African Americans--illustrated by temperance rhetoric and antislavery discourse--occasioned responses by African American writers who had multiple approaches to race-ing temperance. (2) They displayed innovative means by which race, whether foregrounded or situated as subtext, always already operated as a social factor. Because of the prolific racial pejoratives found in mainstream temperance rhetoric, African Americans had to counter these images while simultaneously engaging in temperance activism. Black-authored temperance literature often presented an alternative anti-drink paradigm in which the drunkard's race was either explicitly white or so ambiguous as to destabilize racial categories altogether. Frances E. W. Harper's Sowing and Reaping and another serialized novel, A Tale of New England Life, demonstrate one way that racial identification functioned, for each uses racially indeterminate characters and historical figures from outside the purview of the novel as a way of enhancing the text for various readerships. In this manner, these tales offer textual interrogations of race and racial categories while examining larger social issues of women's liberation and anti-drink reform. approach to temperance reform or writing in these texts is significant because it opens up what might otherwise be narrowly understood as domestic temperance novels without any relation to larger racial and gender politics. Although the author of A Tale of New England Life is unknown, because of textual similarities that include this particular strategic method, I speculate that the author could be Harper. Whether or not we can confirm this to be the case, Harper's existing work offers an example that scholars of nineteenth-century African American women's writings can use to evaluate, understand, and identify newly recovered works first published during the period. In this essay, I will explore the intersections of racial discourse and temperance rhetoric in Sowing and Reaping and A Tale of New England Life, as well as the challenges literary historians and critics face in recovering texts with racial and authorial ambiguities. In the antebellum period, many African American reformers regarded temperance commitment as a necessary component of antislavery advocacy. Although in 1843 William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed, The temperance and abolition enterprises are the hope of our country, identical in principle, based on the same broad foundation of human brotherhood, and animated by the same spirit of Christian benevolence and charity (qtd. in Hamilton 259), many white temperance activists failed to connect the two enterprises--failed to join human equality, freedom, and self-determination as the foundation of their temperance agenda and the inspiration of their abolitionist work. In fact, Frederick Douglass was strongly criticized by white American temperance delegates at the 1846 World's Temperance Convention in London for speaking out against slavery. (3) Without disregarding certain racist and pro-slavery factions in the temperance movement, Douglass identified the relation between the degradation of enslavement and intemperance--between the freedom of self-control denied by slavery and the loss of self-control caused by drunkenness. …

"Opening the Blue of Heaven to Us": Reading Anew the Pioneers of Women's Ordination

“Opening the Blue of Heaven to Us”:1Reading Anew the Pioneers of Women’s Ordination Pamela S. Nadell (bio) "Seeking the face of God, striving to live in His presence and to fashion the life of holiness appropriate to God's presence—these have ever been the core of that religious civilization known to the world as Judaism." Arthur Green, Jewish Spirituality2 In their landmark volume, Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality, Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton gathered scores of Jewish women's religious reflections.3 Recognizing and seeking to fathom the deep wellsprings of Jewish women's spirituality have propelled much of the research of the pioneering generation of Jewish feminist scholars. For example, Chava Weissler saw in the tkhines, the private prayers of early modern Ashkenazi Jewish women, "a directness of passionately emotional personal prayer, mostly absent from the more collective and formalized male worship experience."4 Anthropologist Susan Starr Sered opened up the deep, non-textually based piety of the "religious lives . . . of the illiterate, uneducated, but spiritually attuned elderly Jewish women of the East."5 Umansky, Ashton, Weissler, Sered, and other scholars have established unequivocally that spirituality is as central a rubric for understanding the lived experiences of Jewish women of the past as it is for comprehending the history of Jewish men, whose prayer and sacred study lay so visibly at the heart of Jewish communal life for millennia.6 Yet this theme of Jewish women's spirituality is one I ignored for the cohort I called Women Who Would be Rabbis (1988). In that book, I wrote of women like Ray Frank, the "girl rabbi of the golden West"; Martha Neumark, the rabbinical school student who thought she should have a high holiday pulpit; and Irma Levy Lindheim, the Zionist leader and friend of Jewish Institute [End Page 88] of Religion President Stephen S. Wise. I argued that the women who would, if they could, have been rabbis unknowingly conducted a debate across time and space, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. Largely unaware of those who had preceded them in raising the possibility that women could be rabbis, these women studied over and over again the same religious texts, discovering each time, as if de novo, that there was not a single statement in all the sources of Jewish tradition excluding women from the rabbinate. Then, for additional prooftexts, each paraded a long list of the learned Jewish women of the past, uncovering how their engagement in sacred study had conferred upon them the authority to teach and even on occasion the legitimacy to rule.7 I viewed the women enmeshed in the debate over women's ordination largely as students, as scholars, as readers of Jewish texts. Because of the arguments I made in Women Who Would Be Rabbis,I disregarded what, if anything, these women had to say about whether or not they read their encounter with such texts as a spiritual exercise. As I read their writings, I skipped over the parts where they began to reflect specifically upon living "life in the presence of God." Since these musings did not advance my argument, they did not then interest me. But a popular interest in spirituality has emerged since I wrote that book, along with a growing literature on women's spiritual narratives. In Sentimental Confessions, a 2001 study of the spiritual narratives of nineteenth-century African American women, Jocelyn Moody railed against feminist scholars who tended, as I had, "to overlook, to 'read around' the spiritual dimensions present" in autobiographical narratives. Accusing Christian feminist scholars of neglecting "an essential and vital aspect" of these texts, she argued that "faith in the mystical need not be seen as an indication of imbecility."8 In Holy Boldness, Susie Stanley's 2002 study of women preachers' autobiographies, she uncovered a substantial cohort of women in the Protestant Wesleyan/Holiness tradition whose writings chronicled their spiritual growth.9 Moody's and Stanley's scholarship and the call for essays on spirituality for this special issue of Nashim convinced me to turn once again, with a different set of questions, to some of the narratives written by the women...

A Mental and Moral Feast: Reading, Writing, and Sentimentality in Black Philadelphia

This article examines the ways in which African American women constructed their freedom and their respectability through the maintenance of "friendship albums." Many African American women in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and Boston worked hard to educate themselves and their families; they also worked within various churches and political associations to bring about an end to the institution of slavery. Friendship albums, rare and important historical documents, provide tremendous insight into the attitudes and community-building partnerships among nineteenth-century African American women. Through poetry, sonnets, and journal entries, friendship albums also offer a rare glimpse into African American women's private thoughts and emotions about such hotly debated topics as womanhood, motherhood, freedom, and equality.

The Robes of Womanhood: Dress and Authenticity among African American Methodist Women in the Nineteenth Century

AbstractScholars of American religion are increasingly attentive to material culture as a rich source for the analysis of religious identity and practice that is especially revealing of the relationships among doctrine, bodily comportment, social structures, and innovation. In line with this focus, this article analyses the ways nineteenth-century African American Methodist women turned to dress as a tool to communicate religious and political messages. Though other nineteenth-century Protestants also made use of the communicative powers of dress, African American women did so with a keen awareness of the ways race trumped clothing in the semiotic system of nineteenth-century America. Especially for women entering into public fora as preachers and public speakers, dress could act as a passport to legitimacy in an often hostile setting, but it was not always enough to establish oneself as a Christian lady. Considering the related traditions of plain dress and respectability within the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, this essay finds that AME women cultivated respectability and plainness within discourses of authenticity that tried—with some ambivalence—to use dress as a marker of the true soul beneath the fabric. Based primarily on the autobiographical and journalistic writings of women such as Jarena Lee, Amanda Berry Smith, Hallie Q. Brown, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, as well as accounts from AME publications such as the Christian Recorder and the Church Review, and other church documents, the essay also draws on the work of historians of African American women and historians of dress and material culture. For nineteenth-century AME women, discourses of authenticity could be both a burden and a resource, but either way they were discourses that were often remarkably critical, both of selfmotivation and of cultural markers of class, race, and gender in a world that made a fetish of whiteness.

Nineteenth-Century African American Women's Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs

College English, Volume 66, Number 2, November 2003 Johnnie M. Stover is associate professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. Her areas of instruction and research include American literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with specializations in African American, American Indian, and women’s literatures. Portions of this essay appear in her book, Rhetoric and Resistance in Black Women’s Autobiography (University Press of Florida, 2003). T Nineteenth-Century African American Women’s Autobiography as Social Discourse: The Example of Harriet Ann Jacobs

Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists; Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women

Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century African American Evangelists; Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women

Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth Century African American Women (review)

Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth Century African American Women (review)

Book Review: Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women

Book Review: Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women

Sentimental confessions: spiritual narratives of nineteenth-century African American women

Sentimental Confessions is a groundbreaking study of evangelicalism, sentimentalism, and nationalism in early African American holy women's autobiography. At its core are analyses of the life writings of six women -- Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Prince, Mattie J. Jackson, and Julia Foote -- all of which appeared in the mid-nineteenth century. Joycelyn Moody shows how these authors appropriated white-sanctioned literary conventions to assert their voices and to protest the racism, patriarchy, and other forces that created and sustained their poverty and enslavement. In doing so, Moody also gives us a glimpse at the wealth of insights to be gained from these kinds of writings if we were to acknowledge the spiritual convictions of their authors -- if we read them because (not although) they are holy texts. The deeply held, passionately expressed beliefs of these women, says Moody, should not be brushed aside by scholars as naive or as indicative of the racial, class, and gender oppressions these women suffered. Similarly, Moody argues for new ways of looking at dictated narratives that do not relegate them to a status below self-authored texts. Helping to recover a neglected chapter of American literary history, Sentimental Confessions is filled with insights into the state of the nation in the nineteenth century.

Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women

Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women

Most traditional works of rhetorical history have excluded the activities of women, but Listening to Their Voices retrieves the voices of women who contributed to the rhetorical realm. The nineteen essays in the collection extend existing definitions of rhetoric and enrich conventional knowledge of rhetorical history. In her introduction Molly Meijer Wertheimer traces the patriarchal nature of traditional rhetorical histories as well as the continuing debate about how best to write women into rhetoric's historical record. The volume's essays advance rhetorical theory by examining exceptional women rhetoricians and their unusual rhetorical practices and strategies. Covering a diverse range of rhetorical pursuits and historical eras, the selections look closely at such fascinating topics as the bold speech of ancient Egyptian women, the rhetorical genres of mother's manuals and women's commercial writings in the Middle Ages, the sexual stereotyping of prose style in rhetorical theory of the Enlightenment, and exhortations for racial uplift by nineteenth-century African American women.

Dark Bodies of Discourse: Nineteenth-Century African American Women and the Power of the Word

In her foreword to William Andrews's Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century, Marilyn Richards writes that once we affirm the significance of such well-known nineteenth-century African American women as Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, we have a responsibility as readers and scholars then to recognize that they were neither isolated nor atypical, but were inheritors of a black female tradition of activism founded on a commitment to religious faith, human rights, and women's struggles.' It is precisely this triad of community, tradition, and activism that dominates the substantial body of scholarship specifically about nineteenth-century African American women. From the very first page of Doers of the Word: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, Carla Peterson aligns her book with such prestigious volumes as the aforementioned Sisters of the Spirit, Dorothy Sterling's We are Your Sisters, Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, Joanne Braxton's Black Women Writing Autobiography and Frances Smith Foster's Written by Herself, among