Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

Black Daughter of the Revolution

Lois Brown

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781469614564
  9780807831663
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469606569
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Born into an educated free black family in Portland, Maine, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930) was a pioneering playwright, journalist, novelist, feminist, and public intellectual, best known for her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South. In this critical biography, Lois Brown documents for the first time Hopkins’s early family life and her ancestral connections to eighteenth-century New England, the African slave trade, and twentieth-century race activism in the North.

Brown includes detailed descriptions of Hopkins’s earliest known performances as a singer and actress; textual analysis of her major and minor literary works; information about her most influential mentors, colleagues, and professional affiliations; and details of her battles with Booker T. Washington, which ultimately led to her professional demise as a journalist.

Richly grounded in archival sources, Brown’s work offers a definitive study that clarifies a number of inconsistencies in earlier writing about Hopkins. Brown re-creates the life of a remarkable woman in the context of her times, revealing Hopkins as the descendant of a family comprising many distinguished individuals, an active participant and supporter of the arts, a woman of stature among professional peers and clubwomen, and a gracious and outspoken crusader for African American rights.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Black Daughter, Black History
• 2 Patriarchal Facts and Fictions
• 3 The Creation of a Boston Family
• 4 Progressive Arts and the Public Sphere
• 5 Dramatic Freedom
• 6 Spectacular Matters
• 7 Literary Advocacy
• 8 For Humanity
• 9 Contending Forces as Ancestral Narrative
• 10 Cooperative Enterprises
• 11 (Wo)Manly Testimony
• 12 Love, Loss, and the Reconstitution of Paradise
• 13 “Boyish Hopes” and the Politics of Brotherhood
• 14 The Souls and Spirits of Black Folk
• 15 Witness to the Truth
• 16 The Colored American Magazine in New York City
• 17 New Alliances
• 18 Well Known as a Race Writer
• 19 The New Era Magazine and a “Singlewoman of Boston”
• 20 Cambridge Days
• Appendix 1 Speeches
• Appendix 2 Letters
• Appendix 3 Review of Contending Forces
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index