Colored No More

Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

Treva B. Lindsey

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780252082511, 9780252041020
• eBook ISBN: 9780252099571
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Home to established African American institutions and communities, Washington, D.C., offered women in the New Negro movement a unique setting for the fight against racial and gender oppression. Colored No More traces how African American women of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century made significant strides toward making the nation's capital a more equal and dynamic urban center.

Treva B. Lindsey presents New Negro womanhood as a multidimensional space that included race women, blues women, mothers, white collar professionals, beauticians, fortune tellers, sex workers, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. Drawing from these differing but interconnected African American women's spaces, Lindsey excavates a multifaceted urban and cultural history of struggle toward a vision of equality that could emerge and sustain itself. Upward mobility to equal citizenship for African American women encompassed challenging racial, gender, class, and sexuality status quos. Lindsey maps the intersection of these challenges and their place at the core of New Negro womanhood.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Climbing the Hilltop: New Negro Womanhood at Howard University
• 2 Make Me Beautiful: Aesthetic Discourses of New Negro Womanhood
• 3 Performing and Politicizing “Ladyhood”: Black Washington Women and New Negro Suffrage Activism
• 4 Saturday at the S Street Salon: New Negro Women Playwrights
• Conclusion: Turn-of-the-Century Black Womanhood
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index