Uplifting the Women and the Race

The Lives, Educational Philosophies and Social Activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs

Karen Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136514487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Popular Culture in Art

First published in 2000. This study explores the lives, educational philosophies, and social activism of Anna Julia Cooper and Nannie Helen Burroughs. They were among the most outstanding late 19th and early 20th century Black women educators. The study identifies and analyzes themes that illuminate Cooper and Burroughs' unique angle of vision of self, community, and society as it relates to their distinctive educational philosophies and contributions to American education.

CHAPTER 1
Theoretical Framework

Feminist educator Maxine Green notes that for more than a century “most histories of [American public] education were written by men and focused largely on what male leaders said and did in the field.”¹ Feminist educator Jane R. Martin concurs. She states that even though women have historically

taught the young and have themselves been educated, they are excluded both as the subjects and objects of educational thought from the standard texts and anthologies: as subjects their philosophical works on education are ignored; as objects in works by men about their education and their role as educators of the young they are largely neglected.²

The ideas, writings, intellectual discourses and theorizing produced by African American scholars have also been excluded, ignored and marginalized in the dominant educational literature. As critical educational theorist Beverly Gordon notes, “most of the curriculum fields and indeed educational literature in both the academy and popular cultures are grounded in the Euro-American regime of truth.”³ Gordon argues that while there are prominent African American educational scholars whose research has been published and reviewed in mainstream journals, their ideas, theories, and experiences have not impacted significantly the predominant paradigms in the field of education. She further argues that there is “no absence of discourse and literature” produced by past and present African American scholars such as Carter G. Woodson, Horace Mann Bond, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and W. E. B. Du Bois, just to name a few. “Black people,” she explains, “have created a body of cultural knowledge that transcends disciplinary lines in science, education, social theory and other fields. It includes useful theoretical constructs, paradigms, and models of viewing and seeing the world.”⁴ According to Gordon, this body of scholarship “generated out of and influenced by the African American existential condition… could inform educational research and theory and have practical teaching implications.”⁵

To give “voice” to Anna Julia Cooper's and Nannie Helen Burroughs' educational philosophies, I use a theoretical perspective grounded in Black feminist epistemology. My study, therefore, proceeds from the assumptions that a reclaiming of the lives, works and subjugated discourses of Cooper and Burroughs requires a critical framework that does not subordinate or marginalize race, class and gender issues, which is the case in traditional frameworks. Epistemology is the study of the philosophical problems in concepts of knowledge and truth. The theoretical framework employed for my study will be informed by Black feminist theory. According to Black feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminist theory is a “specialized thought that reflects the thematic content of the standpoint of African American women's experiences.”⁶ Collins maintains that Black feminist thought is subjugated knowledge because Black women have had to battle against Eurocentric masculinist views of the world in order to convey a self-defined standpoint. She further notes that

the suppression of Black women's efforts to self-definition in traditional sites of knowledge production had led African American women to use alternative sites such as music, literature, daily conversations, and everyday behavior as important locations for articulating the core themes of Black feminist consciousness.⁷

The epistemological basis of this theory provides: (1) an explanation why Western Anglo masculinist thought has excluded and or marginalized the scholarship and intellectual discourse of Black female educators such as Cooper and Burroughs and (2) a conceptual framework that illuminates the contributions and the educational philosophies of the above mentioned educators and places these contributions and philosophies at the center of analysis.

To reclaim the voices and standpoints of Cooper and Burroughs, I use their personal experiences as well as the personal experiences of other African American women for themes that relate to Black women's experiences. I use this in addition to established bodies of academic research.

SECTION I: BLACK FEMINIST THEORY

Feminist researcher Beverly Guy-Shettall explains that “Black feminist theory came of age during the 1990s and moved from margin to the center of mainstream feminist discourse.”⁸ Feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins analyzes three core themes of Black feminism as the following: (1) the interlocking nature of race, class, and gender oppression in Black women's personal, domestic, and work lives (2) the necessity of internalizing positive self-definitions and rejecting the denigrating, stereotypical, and controlling images of others, both within and without the Black community (3) and the need for active struggle to resist oppression and realize individual and group empowerment.⁹

Black feminist theory was developed as an appropriate epistemolog-ical framework for understanding Black women's lives and was one of the responses to the problematic of dominant Western Anglo masculinist assumptions of traditional scientific research. Eurocentric Western science promulgated the idea that knowledge can be universally applicable because all human experiences are generic regardless of race, class and gender differences.

Collins defines Black feminist theory as those experiences and ideas grounded in African American women's lives that provide a “unique angle of vision on self, community and society.” It comprises theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it. This epis-temology consists of “specialized knowledge” created by African American women, which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. It employs four dimensions: concrete experiences as a criterion of meaning, the use of dialogue in assessing knowledge claims, an ethic of caring and concern for the totality of the entire Black community and an ethic of personal accountability.¹⁰ The concrete experience relates to the Black woman's “ways of knowing” or validating knowledge claims. One's place or location in a social historical, cultural, political context, gives rise to one assessing knowledge or deconstructing prevailing notions of truths based on one's lived experiences. Patricia Hill Collins argues that concrete experience is both an Afrocentric and a woman's tradition. For dialogue, a primary epistemological assumption underlying dialogue “implies talk between two subjects, not the speech of subject and object. It is humanizing speech, one that challenges and resists domination.”¹¹ For Black women, “new knowledge claims are rarely worked out in isolation from other individuals and are usually developed through dialogues with other members of a community.”¹² In other words, Black women have the “opportunity to deconstruct the specificity of their own experiences and make connections with the collective experiences of others.”¹³ An ethic of caring also reflects both an African and a woman's tradition. Its components include the “value placed on individual expressiveness, the appropriateness of emotions, and the capacity for empathy most of which pervade the African American culture.”¹⁴ The fourth dimension of Black feminist epistemology is an ethic of personal accountability. Its characteristics include a convergence of an Afrocentric value and feminist's value. Moral development and maintaining social relationships are central to the knowledge validation process.¹⁵

Collins postulates that the “theoretical framework of Black feminist thought, in which the Afrocentric perspective is inherent, sees race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression.”¹⁶ She contends that “Black feminist knowledge generates collective consciousness that transform social, political and economic relations.” She argues that:

[Black] feminist thought offers two significant contributions toward furthering our understanding of the important connections among knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. First, Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift in how we think about oppression. By embracing a paradigm of race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, Black feminist thought reconceptualizes the social relations of domination and resistance. Second, Black feminist thought addresses ongoing epistemolog...