But Some of Us Are Brave

Black Women's Studies

Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, Barbara Smith, Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, Barbara Smith

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781558618992
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

Published in 1982, But Some of Us Are Brave was the first-ever Black women's studies reader and a foundational text of contemporary feminism.

Featuringwritingfrom eminent scholars, activists, teachers, and writers, such as the Combahee River Collective and Alice Walker, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave challenges the absence of Black feminist thought in women's studies, confronts racism, and investigates the mythology surrounding Black women in the social sciences.

As the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship, But Some of Us Are Brave was recognized by Audre Lorde as "the beginning of a new era, where the 'women' in women's studies will no longer mean 'white.'"

Coeditors Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith are authors and former women's studies professors. Brittney C. Cooper is aprofessor of Women's and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. She is the author of several books, including Eloquent Rage, named by Emma Watson as an Our Shared Shelf read for November/December 2018.

Section Six

Bibliographies and Bibliographic Essays

Afro-American Women, 1800-1910: Excerpts from a Working Bibliography

JEAN FAGAN YELLIN

INTRODUCTION

Their presence is what is most important. If we are unaware of Black women in nineteenth-century America, it is not because they were not here; if we know nothing of their literature and culture, it is not because they left no records. It is because their lives and their work have been profoundly ignored. Both as the producers of culture and as the subjects of the cultural productions of others, however, their traces are everywhere.

For example, Ethel S. Bolton and Eva J. Coe list in American Samplers (1921)—the standard work on a folk art expressive of female education—the sampler of Phebe Cash. The identity of the young needlewoman, described as a “Negro child belonging to Mrs. Sarah (Kent) Atkins, widow of Dudley Atkins, Esq. of Newburgh,” is recorded. Significantly, she is defined in terms of her enslavement to a woman who is herself defined by her marriage to a man; obviously even after death he retains an autonomy denied both living females.

A second nineteenth-century Afro-American sampler was worked by Rosena Disery at the New York African Free School. Her embroidery raises questions about the education of Afro-American females in New York in 1820. How many attended the school? Were boys and girls educated together? What did they study? Did they have Black teachers? Black women teachers?

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*This is a series of excerpts from the working manuscript of a book-length reference tool, Writings By and About Nineteenth-Century Afro-American Women, planned for publication by G. K. Hall Company as part of the Yale Afro-American Reference Series under the general editorship of Charles T. Davis. I have based this listing on my own work, and earnestly invite comments, additions, and corrections. I wish to thank Ruth Bogin, William R. Ferris, Jr., Ernest Kaiser, and Joan R. Sherman for their valuable aid. It would have been impossible to move my project even this far along without Bruce Bergman, Assistant University Librarian, and the staff of the Pace University Library in New York City; without Jean Blackwell Hutson, Director, and the staff of the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library; and without Rose Ann Burstein, Librarian, and the staff of the Sarah Lawrence College Library. I am grateful for their patient help.

Traces of the existence of young Black women can be found not only in their own embroideries, but in the needlework of others. Sally Johnson’s sampler, finished the year before the nineteenth century opened, depicts a tropical setting in which a tiny Black girl follows an even tinier white girl. It is a matter of speculation whether this scene was a response to the Haitian revolt which ushered the era of Emancipation into the New World; but there is no question that it attests to one white Massachusetts girl’s awareness of a Black female presence.

This awareness has been lost. Yet for us to view American culture steadily and whole, it must be restored. Rather than express surprise when we encounter Black women in the study of nineteenth-century America, we need to ask why they are missing when we do not. Then we need to search and find them.

The importance of restoring the historical presence of Black women cannot be overemphasized, given their absence from otherwise responsible materials in women’s studies and in Black studies. This has not always been the case; Black women were often included in the early, pioneering works. In The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, published in 1891, I. Garland Penn included a sixty-page chapter entitled “Afro-American Women in Journalism.” Similarly, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others of the first feminist generation began their History of Woman Suffrage (6 vols., 1881-1922), they recorded the activities of more than a dozen Black feminists.¹ But female journalists are omitted in a later standard study, Frederick G. Detweiler’s The Negro Press in the United States (1922); and not a single Afro-American is included among the 1,500 biographical subjects treated by feminists Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore in American Women: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of the Lives and Achievements of American Women during the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (1897; reprinted in 1973).

So conspicuous is the absence of Black women from most standard works in Black studies and women’s studies today that one wonders whether they were systematically excluded as these materials were professionalized and introduced into the universities. This would not be too surprising: Afro-Americans and women became subjects of serious academic consideration during a period of rupture between the movement for women’s rights and the movement for the rights of Afro-Americans. (See Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920 [1965], ch. 7; and see my own “DuBois’ Crisis and Woman’s Suffrage,” Massachusetts Review 14 [Spring 1973]: 365-75.)

Black women are not, however, ignored in all standard reference works. The discussions that follow consistently refer the reader to two generally available resources on women which include Afro-Americans: Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; 1970); and Edward T. and Janet W. James, eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (1971). Because it is similarly available, a number of references are also made to the standard Afro-American bibliography, James M. McPherson, Laurence B. Holland, James M. Banner, Jr., Nancy C. Weiss, and Michael D. Bell, Blacks in America: Bibliographical Essays (1971); although its index lists only two items under “women,” a large number of the works cited-particularly the older ones-include discussions of women. But a word of warning is in order. All too often these early studies present inaccurate details. With a few significant exceptions, it is only recently that writings by and about Black women have begun to be organized and presented systematically.

Teaching about nineteenth-century Afro-American women has become easier since the 1960s because of the publication of a handful of books. Five of these are anthologies, and two are historical and critical studies. Two of the anthologies focus on Afro-American women: the pioneering Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972); and Bert James Loewenberg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life: Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings (1976). The three other collections present Black writings before the twentieth century: these are Dorothy Porter’s excellent Early Negro Writing, 1760-1837 (1971), and two anthologies edited by William H. Robinson, Early Black American Poets: Selections with Biographical Introductions (1969) and Early Black American Prose: Selections with Biographical Introductions (1971)—companion volumes which, despite errors, are of value.

The book-length study by Joan R. Sherman, Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century (1974), presents a series of critical essays, meticulous notes, and suggestions for further work. The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978), edited by Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, includes six essays in which scholars offer historical perspectives on such topics as employment, women’s organizations, feminism, and the blues tradition; the editors then focus on three women, two of whom (Anna J. Cooper and Nannie Burroughs) worked within the period here considered. With the appearance of these volumes—and with the publication of paperback editions of some of the slave narratives, autobiographies, and journals of nineteenth-century women, including Charlotte Forten, Harriet Brent Jacobs, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells—a series of primary readings for students can now be readily compiled.

As back-up sources, the reprinting of landmark books in Afro-American studies and women’s studies since the late 1960s has made it possible for libraries and for individual scholars to acquire reference works that had long been out of print. Concurrently, a number of new bibliographical tools have been developed for the study of Black literature and culture which systematically present the multiple roles of women. These are discussed in appropriate sections below.

The topics presented here are Reference Tools; General Discussions; Arts, Fine and Folk; Education; Employment; Public Affairs: Women’s Organizations; Religion; and Urban Life. To update these, see the sections on “Women’s History” and “Black History” listed under “Social History” in Writings in American History (1962-), an annual; and see “Recent Articles” listed in each number of the Journal of Christian History.

REFERENCE TOOLS

The single most useful source of general information about Afro-American women in the nineteenth century is Mabel M. Smythe, ed., The Black American Reference Book (1976). This is a second edition of The American Negro Reference Book (1966); a preliminary note announces that this revision attempts to eliminate sexual bias. The volume includes Ernestine Walker’s basic essay, “The Black Woman,” followed by a “Selected List of Black Women of Achievement.” Arna Bontemps’s indispensable “Black Contribution to American Letters” again appears.

A half-dozen research tools on Afro-American women were developed in the 1970s. Gerda Lerner’s bibliographical essay in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972) is a major contribution. In conjunction with this, see Lenwood G. Davis’s valuable Black Woman in American Society: A Selected Annotated Bibliography (1975). The focus of Janet L. Sims’s topically organized Black Women: A Selected Bibliography (1978) is on the twentieth century, as is that of Ora Williams, American Black Women in the Arts and Social Sciences: A Bibliographic Survey (1973). For women in nineteenth-and twentieth-century urban life, see a second listing by Davis, Black Women in the Cities, 1870-1975: A Bibliography, 2d ed. (1975). Johnetta B. Cole’s innovative “Black Women in America: An Annotated Bibliography,” Black Scholar 3:4 (December 1971):42-53, which uses a cross-cultural approach, cites a number of materials on the nineteenth century.

Most standard Afro-American reference tools list pertinent materials on nineteenth-century women. Although not identified as a topic in James M. McPherson et al., Blacks in America: Biblio...