All Bound Up Together

The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900

Martha S. Jones

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780807858455, 9780807831526
• eBook ISBN: 9780807888902
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

The place of women’s rights in African American public culture has been an enduring question, one that has long engaged activists, commentators, and scholars. All Bound Up Together explores the roles black women played in their communities' social movements and the consequences of elevating women into positions of visibility and leadership. Martha Jones reveals how, through the nineteenth century, the “woman question” was at the core of movements against slavery and for civil rights.

Unlike white women activists, who often created their own institutions separate from men, black women, Jones explains, often organized within already existing institutions — churches, political organizations, mutual aid societies, and schools. Covering three generations of black women activists, Jones demonstrates that their approach was not unanimous or monolithic but changed over time and took a variety of forms, from a woman’s right to control her body to her right to vote. Through a far-ranging look at politics, church, and social life, Jones demonstrates how women have helped shape the course of black public culture.

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright page
• The John Hope Franklin
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Female Influence Is Powerful: Respectability, Responsibility, and Setting the Terms of the Woman Question Debate
• Chapter Two: Right Is of No Sex: Reframing the Debate through the Rights of Women
• Chapter Three: Not a Woman’s Rights Convention: Remaking Public Culture in the Era of Dred Scott v. Sanford
• Chapter Four: Something Very Novel and Strange: Civil War, Emancipation, and the Remaking of African American Public Culture
• Chapter Five: Make Us a Power: Churchwomen’s Politics and the Campaign for Women’s Rights
• Chapter Six: Too Much Useless Male Timber: The Nadir, the Woman’s Era, and the Question of Women’s Ordination
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Acknowledgments