Womanist Forefathers

Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois

Gary L. Lemons

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781438427560, 9781438427553
• eBook ISBN: 9781438427690
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Traces a lineage of pro-feminist black men to two early radical proponents of female equality.

What role did African American men have in the early twentieth-century struggle for women's suffrage? How is gender significant to the historical and contemporary struggles for African American liberation? In Womanist Forefathers, Gary L. Lemons examines the memoirs and political writings on women by Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, positioning these radical proponents of female equality as "womanist forefathers" to later generations of gender progressive black men. Lemons argues that the writings of Douglass and Du Bois, which merge confessional narrative with social criticism, demonstrate the power of pro-womanist thinking in the vision of racial uplift both men advanced. Womanist Forefathers then traces the lineage between these early African American activists to contemporary pro-feminist black men, many of whom have similarly combined analyses of the personal with the political to envision a black male brotherhood founded on womanist principles, free from nationalism rooted in patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia.

Table of contents

• Womanist Forefathers
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Theorizing a Pro-Woman(ist) Politics of Gender Justice before, during,and after “The Black Sexism Debate”
• Introduction: Black Men Writing Ourselves into Pro-woman(ist) Being(s) in the Name of the Black Maternal
• Part 1. Reclaiming Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Boisas Womanist Forefathers
• Part II. Black Feminist “Sisters,” “Brothers,”and Fathers: Securing the Womanist Legacy
• Epilogue: “This Is What a (Black Male)Feminist Looks Like”Time Has Brought about a Change
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index