Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds

by Kristin Waters (Editor), Carol B. Conaway (Editor)

Overview

A new edition of a landmark work on Black women’s intellectual traditions.
 
An astonishing wealth of literary and intellectual work by nineteenth-century Black women is being rediscovered and restored to print in scholarly and popular editions. In Kristin Waters’s and Carol B. Conaway’s landmark edited collection, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds, sophisticated commentary on this rich body of work chronicles a powerful and interwoven legacy of activism based in social and political theories that helped shape the history of North America. The book meticulously reclaims this American legacy, providing a collection of critical analyses of the primary sources and their vital traditions. Written by leading scholars, Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions is particularly powerful in its exploration of the pioneering thought and action of the nineteenth-century Black woman lecturer and essayist Maria W. Stewart, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, novelist and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, educator Anna Julia Cooper, newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and activist Ida B. Wells. The distinguished contributors are Hazel V. Carby, Patricia Hill Collins, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Kristin Waters, R. Dianne Bartlow, Carol B. Conaway, Olga Idriss Davis, Vanessa Holford Diana, Evelyn Simien, Janice W. Fernheimer, Michelle N. Garfield, Joy James, Valerie Palmer-Mehta, Carla L. Peterson, Marilyn Richardson, Evelyn M. Simien, Ebony A. Utley, Mary Helen Washington, Melina Abdullah, and Lena Ampadu. The volume will interest scholars and readers of African-American and women’s studies, history, rhetoric, literature, poetry, sociology, political science, and philosophy. This updated edition features a new preface by the editors in the light of new developments in current scholarship.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781684581412
Publisher:	Brandeis University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2022
Edition description:	New edition
Pages:	496
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Kristin Waters is professor of philosophy emerita at Worcester State University, a scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and the author of Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought.


Carol B. Conaway is associate professor emerita of women’s and gender studies at the University of New Hampshire and an expert on the press and race relations.

Table of Contents

Preface to the New Edition xi

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction Carol B. Conaway Kristin Waters 1

Part I Maria W. Stewart: Black Feminism in Public Places

1 Maria W Stewart: America's First Black Woman Political Writer Marilyn Richardson 13

2 Maria W. Stewart and the Rhetoric of Black Preaching: Perspectives on Womanism and Black Nationalism Lena Ampadu 38

3 A Woman Made of Words: The Rhetorical Invention of Maria W. Stewart Ebony A. Utley 55

4 "No Throw-away Woman": Maria W. Stewart as a Forerunner of Black Feminist Thought R. Dianne Bartlow 72

Part II Incidents in the Lives: Free Women and Slaves

5 "Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters": Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation Hazel V. Carby 91

6 Literary Societies: The Work of Self-Improvement and Racial Uplift Michelle N. Garfield 113

7 "A Sign unto This Nation": Sojourner Truth, History, Orature, and Modernity Carla L. Peterson 129

Part III Harper, Hopkins, and Shadd Cary: Writing Our Way to Freedom

8 Narrative Patternings of Resistance in Frances E. W. Harper's Lola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins' Contending Forces Vanessa Holford Diana 173

9 "We Are All Bound Up Together": Frances Harper and Feminist Theory Valerie Palmer-Mehta 192

10 Mary Ann Shadd Cary: A Visionary of the Black Press Carol B. Conaway 216

Part IV Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice

11 Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice from the South Mary Helen Washington 249

12 A Singing Something: Womanist Reflections on Anna Julia Cooper Karen Baker-Fletcher 269

13 Arguing from Difference: Cooper, Emerson, Guizot, and a More Harmonious America Janice W. Fernheimer 287

Part V Leadership, Activism, and the Genius of Ida B. Wells

14 "I Rose and Found My Voice": Claiming "Voice" in the Rhetoric of Ida B. Wells Olga Idriss Davis 309

15 The Emergence of a Black Feminist Leadership Model: African-American Women and Political Activism in the Nineteenth Century Melina Abdullah 328

16 Shadowboxing: Liberation Limbos-Ida B. Wells Joy James 346

Part VI Black Feminist Theory: From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First

17 Some Core Themes of Nineteenth-Century Black Feminism Kristin Waters 365

18 The Politics of Black Feminist Thought Patricia Hill Collins 393

19 Black Feminist Theory: Charting a Course for Black Women's Studies in Political Science Evelyn M. Simien 419

Selected Bibliography 433

Notes on Contributors 437

Index 441

What People are Saying About This

Darlene Clark Hine

"A remarkable and invaluable anthology... I read with pleasure the splendid analyses of black women's activism and the thought-provoking interpretations of their textured voices in slave narratives, speeches, religious sermons, letters, and expressive productions."
— Darlene Clark Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History, Northwestern University

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Previous Edition:
"Kristen Waters and Carol Conaway's Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds is an interpretative examination and reclamation of the intellectual traditions of African American women in North America. This volume is skillfully crafted, prominently displaying black female intellectualism and activism that is centered in a culture of resistance and grounded in traditions born of their lived experiences. This anthology represents a new paradigm for understanding the historical and contemporary intellectual production of African American women . . ."

The Journal of African American History

Praise for Previous Edition:
“A remarkable and invaluable anthology... I read with pleasure the splendid analyses of black women’s activism and the thought-provoking interpretations of their textured voices in slave narratives, speeches, religious sermons, letters, and expressive productions.

Darlene Clark Hine

Praise for Previous Edition:
"The reader, whether familiar with the intellectuals and traditions covered in this text or seeking knowledge about them for the first time, is guaranteed to learn something new from this masterful collection of essays."

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

Praise for Previous Edition:
"In one wonderfully rich and comprehensive volume, Waters and Conaway present the foundation of the groundbreaking, but little known, history of black women's early intellectual pursuits."

A'Lelia Bundles

Praise for Previous Edition:
"Black Women's Intellectual Traditions challenges us not just to insert black women into feminist histories, but to expand and rework our definitions and histories of feminism and of African American intellectual traditions . . . Black Women's Intellectual Traditions is about the future as well as the past, and about what can be, as well as what has been, done. Its message should resonate with those in the academy and beyond, those explicitly identified as feminists and those who might deny (or be denied) that designation, and women and men of all races who seek to study, teach, and promote the black feminist vision of resistance to injustice."

Journal of American History

Awarded

2007 by the Association of Black Women Historians The Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award for Best Anthology

Named as one of

Fall 2017 list of fifty recommended books on black feminism