All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900 / Edition 1

by Martha S. Jones

Overview

The place of women's rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. All Bound Up Together explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the "woman question" was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.

Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women, Jones explains, often organized within already existing institutions—churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, Jones demonstrates that their approach was not unanimous or monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman's right to control her body to her right to vote. Through a far-ranging look at politics, church, and social life, Jones demonstrates how women have helped shape the course of black public culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807858455
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	10/08/2007
Series:	The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	733,042
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Martha S. Jones is associate professor of history and Afroamerican and African studies and visiting professor of law at the University of Michigan.

Table of Contents

Introduction     1
Female Influence Is Powerful: Respectability, Responsibility, and Setting the Terms of the Woman Question Debate     23
Right Is of No Sex: Reframing the Debate through the Rights of Women     59
Not a Woman's Rights Convention: Remaking Public Culture in the Era of Dred Scott v. Sanford     87
Something Very Novel and Strange: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Remaking of African American Public Culture     119
Make Us a Power: Churchwomen's Politics and the Campaign for Women's Rights     151
Too Much Useless Male Timber: The Nadir, the Woman's Era, and the Question of Women's Ordination     173
Conclusion     205
Notes     209
Selected Bibliography     271
Acknowledgments     301
Index     305

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Jones has brilliantly rehistoricized black feminism and reframed the 'woman question.' —Journal of Southern History



Provides important background. . . . Highly recommended.—Choice



An important contribution to the growing literature on black women's political activism . . . in the nineteenth century.—Signs



Ever mindful of the history of the experiences of white women, Jones proves that black women's experiences stood separate, and she fruitfully explores the overlaps and digressions. At the same time, she plants the story firmly within the African American experience and its chronology. All Bound Up Together gives us a new and insightful understanding of women's rights and calls into question many of the foundational concepts of women's history.—Glenda Gilmore, Yale University



This book is groundbreaking in its reconfiguration of black women's rights as part and parcel of both the black freedom struggle in the nineteenth century and the first wave of American feminism. It recasts both stories in critical ways and, more important, makes clear that they are deeply intertwined. This work is a tour de force.—Nancy A. Hewitt, Rutgers University



This important study attests to the continuing vitality of the field of African American women's history.—Journal of American History

Editorial Reviews

Convincingly illustrates the degree to which the women question influenced all aspects of northern black culture from the 1830s onward. . . . Well-written and thoroughly researched.—Journal of Social History



Jones distinguishes African American women's voices, spaces, and places, focusing on the unique aspects of their multidimensional existence. . . . Provides detailed accounts. . . . Documents how these women shaped and defined the nature of American public culture in the 19th century.—Journal of African American History

From the Publisher