We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible : A Reader in Black Women's History

by Hine, Darlene Clark

• ISBN13: 9780926019812
• ISBN10: 0926019813
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-09-01
• Publisher: New York University Press

Summary

From the introduction: This book was put together to reclaim, and to create heightened awareness about, individuals, contributions, and struggles that have made African-American survival and progress possible. We cannot accurately comprehend either our hidden potential or the full range of problems that besiege us until we know about the successful struggles that generations of foremothers waged against virtually insurmountable obstacles. We can, and will, chart a coherent future and win essential opportunities with a clear understanding of the past in all its pain and glory.Here, in a single volume, is a sweeping panorama of black women's experience throughout history and across classes and continents. Containing over 30 crucial essays by the most influential and prominent scholars in the field, including Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Linda Gordon, and Nell Irvin Painter,We Specialize in the Wholly Impossibleis a comprehensive assessment of black women's lives.The book is divided into six sections: theory; Africa; the Caribbean and Canada; 18th-century United States; 19th-century United States; and 20th-century United States. A remarkably diverse range of topics are covered, with chapters on such subjects as working-class consciousness among Afro-American women; the impact of slavery on family structure; black women missionaries in South Africa; slavery, sharecropping, and sexual inequality; black women during the American Revolution; imprisoned black women in the American West; women's welfare activism; SNCC and black women's activism; and property-owning free African-American women in the 19th-century South.

Table of Contents

Introduction	xi
Part I: General Theoretical Essays
African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race	3	(22)
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
When Your Work Is Not Who You Are: The Development of a Working-Class Consciousness among Afro-American Women	25	(14)
Sharon Harley
``What Has Happened Here'': The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics	39	(18)
Elsa Barkley Brown
Part II: Africa
Sexual Demography: The Impact of the Slave Trade on Family Structure	57	(10)
John Thornton
African Women in the Atlantic Slave Trade	67	(10)
Herbert S. Klein
Concubinage and the Status of Women Slaves in Early Colonial Northern Nigeria	77	(26)
Paul E. Lovejoy
Give a Thought to Africa: Black Women Missionaries in Southern Africa	103	(24)
Sylvia M. Jacobs
Part III: Caribbean and Canada
Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective	127	(16)
Rhoda E. Reddock
A Study of Two Women's Slave Narratives: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The History of Mary Prince	143	(4)
Andrea Starr Alonzo
Defiance or Submission? The Role of the Slave Woman in Slave Resistance in the British Caribbean	147	(24)
Barbara Bush
The Search for Mary Bibb, Black Woman Teacher in Nineteenth-Century Canada West	171	(18)
Afua Cooper
Part IV: United States---Eighteenth Century
The Double Bonds of Race and Sex: Black and White Women in a Colonial Virginia Parish	189	(22)
Joan Rezner Gundersen
Black Women in the Era of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania	211	(14)
Debra L. Newman
From Three-Fifths to Zero: Implications of the Constitution for African-American Women, 1787-1870	225	(12)
Mamie E. Locke
Part V: United States---Nineteenth Century
Free African-American Women in Savannah, 1800-1860: Affluence and Autonomy Amid Adversity	237	(16)
Whittington B. Johnson
Property Owning Free African-American Women in the South, 1800-1870	253	(28)
Loren Schweninger
Slavery, Sharecropping, and Sexual Inequality	281	(22)
Susan A. Mann
``A Career to Build, a People to Serve, a Purpose to Accomplish'': Race, Class, Gender, and Detroit's First Black Women Teachers, 1865-1916	303	(18)
John B. Reid
Still in Chains: Black Women in Western Prisons, 1865-1910	321	(14)
Anne M. Butler
The Southern Side of ``Glory'': Mississippi African-American Women During the Civil War	335	(8)
Noralee Frankel
Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta	343	(16)
Tera W. Hunter
Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic	359	(14)
Nell Irvin Painter
Black Womanhood in Nineteenth-Century America: Subversion and Self-Construction in Two Women's Autobiographies	373	(20)
Beth Maclay Doriani
Clothing as an Expression of History: The Dress of African-American Women in Georgia, 1880-1915	393	(14)
Patricia K. Hunt
Part VI: United States---Twentieth Century
``Civilization,'' the Decline of Middle-Class Manliness, and Ida B. Wells's Antilynching Campaign (1892-94)	407	(26)
Gail Bederman
Black Club Women and the Creation of the National Association of Colored Women	433	(16)
Stephanie J. Shaw
Black and White Visions of Welfare: Women's Welfare Activism, 1890-1945	449	(38)
Linda Gordon
Discontented Black Feminists: Prelude and Postscript to the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment	487	(18)
Rosalyn Terborg-Penn
The Black Community and the Birth Control Movement	505	(16)
Jessie M. Rodrique
And Still I Rise: Black Women and Reform, Buffalo, New York, 1900-1940	521	(22)
Lillian S. Williams
``We All Seem Like Brothers and Sisters'': The African-American Community in Manhattan, Kansas, 1865-1940	543	(18)
Nupur Chaudhuri
Black Women Activists and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: The Case of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson	561	(18)
Cynthia Griggs Fleming
Notes on Editors and Contributors	579	(6)
Copyrights and Permissions	585	(4)
Index	589