Search Results

This chapter focuses on one important dimension of women's experience of empire, their encounter with attempts to control and redirect their sexuality. Controlling men's labour, always of paramount importance to the architects of empire in Africa, was matched, if not at times surpassed, by colonial concerns over the sexuality of African women. As the nature of gender relations changed under the architecture of colonial administration, so the experiences of women were altered. Control over women's labour was also vital to the imperial project, and African women experienced major changes in the quantity, nature, and context of their work within the empire.

This chapter describes the ways in which self-silencing theory can be used to understand the experiences of women in inner-city Boston living with HIV/AIDS. The author discusses how the self-silencing construct contributed to the creation of a gender-sensitive culturally relevant intervention related to safe sex behaviors for women at risk. The chapter presents a program of community-based participatory action research that involves (a) an examination of the complex problem of women living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, and (b) the use of the author's culturally relevant intervention to change behavior, increase self-esteem, decrease depression, and give ”voice” to women. The author argues that self-silencing theory can be applied in creating an innovative approach to HIV/AIDS prevention for women.

This chapter focuses on the 1920 essay “The Damnation of Women,” Du Bois's collective biography of African American women. Despite the masculinism that defines much of his writing, and the tensions that qualify even his strongest arguments on behalf of gender equality, this essay demands that readers grapple with the meaning of “womanhood” and “citizenship” through the lens of black women's history. It also reorients feminist citizenship theory in the United States by demonstrating the need to go beyond reckoning with race to confront the lingering shadows of slavery.

Having won the ballot, the former suffragists organized the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, through which women could continue to work as a pressure group for a female reform agenda. Minnie Fisher Cunningham helped found both the Texas and the national LWVs; from 1921-23 she served in Washington, D.C. as the national organization's first executive secretary, working closely with President Maud Wood Park. She helped the LWV, as part of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, lobby through Congress two signature achievements: the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921) and the Cable Act (1922). Cunningham oversaw the planning for the LWV's Pan American Congress of Women in 1922, and she quietly and persistently worked to keep the LWV's Negro Problems Committee from dying of neglect. After becoming chair of the committee in 1924, she advocated that the LWV encourage and assist African-American women to vote.

This chapter describes landmark legal arguments Murray made about equal protection in the 1960s. Using the category of “Jane Crow,” she demanded that the law be responsive to the synthetic nature of identity. In so doing, Murray placed African American women's experiences at the center of democratic consideration. Despite her attempts to build coalitions, she found herself increasingly at odds with leaders of the feminist and Black Freedom movements.

This chapter presents the history of early African American beauty contests, which were black institutional responses to racist depictions of black women. They constitute evidence that African Americans did not accept the dominant racial order as natural. With few exceptions, the contests were produced by black institutions exclusively for black audiences. Separate by design, these contests can be considered nationalist, though they should not be automatically grouped analytically with later expressions of black separatism. The early black beauty contests were produced in an era of white racist segregation. In that context, black social institutions did not, in and of themselves, present a direct or immediate challenge to whites. Beauty pageants were generally sponsored by members of the black middle class and reflected the biases characteristic of the class. Black newspapers and social clubs established separate black beauty pageants as nonconfrontational ways of expressing racial pride, but they often reinforced hierarchies of gender, class, and color in their challenges to white supremacy.

“Licentiousness in All its Forms” recovers African American women’s significant intervention into sexual discourse between 1835 and 1845, a period here designated the interracial moment in moral reform. In an era of amalgamation riots, some black abolitionists forged a delicate coalition with white evangelicals. Female moral reformers condemned “licentiousness in all its forms,” and black abolitionists applied this language to “the licentiousness of slavery.” In turn, African American women built upon the physiological contention that all bodies were equally prone to virtue or vice. By distinguishing universal sexual virtue from white female purity, they undercut stereotypes of black licentiousness. Activists such as Sarah Mapps Douglass, Nancy Prince, Lavinia Hilton and Hetty Burr inspired Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s famous analysis of women’s moral equality with men. In this activist context, it became both possible and necessary for a few white women to question assumptions of their inherent purity. In the process, they applied the language of solitary vice to their own lives. African American women strategically appropriated antimasturbation physiology even as they remained focused on structural oppression. Although they only temporarily destabilized racialized discourses on female sexuality, their moral reform efforts had significant consequences for American sexual thought.

In August 1965, the community of the Little Children of our Blessed Lady (or LCBL Sisters) at Hwedza asked Sister Rocha Mushonga to accompany Sister Ancilla, their delegate to the congregation's first general chapter, as a secretary. Thus began the indigenization of the LCBL Sisters' leadership. This chapter describes how small groups of soft-spoken yet resolute groups of African women became nuns. The stories and experiences of these African nuns clearly shows them as agents taking some measure of control over their lives, and their actions had significant effects on African culture as well as on the relations between European administrators and missionaries. These were not merely passive, docile women who did what they were told to do by parents, priests, or politicians. Rather, they defied their parents and their culture. African men's actions also contributed to the forging of a new Southern Rhodesian colonial social practice.

This chapter explores conversations involving black and white women across multiple settings (for example, cosmetology schools, hair educational seminars, Internet discussions) that further elucidate what is at stake for African American women in discussions about hair. African American women's hair narratives and knowledge about hair were, in many ways, filtered through their experiences of marginalization as a collective of women whose ethnic features were long considered unattractive. Black women's ideas about hair are intricately connected to cultural identity, gendered experiences, and racial consciousness. In three separate hair discussions, white women unwittingly ran into trouble despite their attempts to align with black women. This chapter examines the nature of their linguistic missteps and black women's (mis)readings to illuminate what went wrong and what contributed to these women's conversational alignments and misalignments.

This chapter shows how the progressive women's communities emerged during the Progressive Era. Galveston supplied an environment conducive to middle and upper-class women's advancement from congregational life into community activism. It helped extend women's issues to public forums. Three progressive communities emerged: African American Women's Hospital Aid Society, the Women's Progressive Club, and the Negro Women Voters' League. They all had nurtured ameliorative and reforming sentiments. These associations were separated by race but their goals advanced women to positions of leadership. Thus, the first two decades became women's decades as they organized to protect the health, seek equal rights and opportunities for women and combat discrimination. It worked for a healthier, safer urban environment for the women.

“Jesus is my doctor”, a claim made by many black women, raises a rich mélange of culturally resonant issues. Faith is articulated as an active, powerful, protective, creative partnership with a God who loves completely and without reservation. Lived in the body, community, and world, African American women's faith often extends to hope for the healing of all people as a natural corollary of envisioning a new, more perfect world. Faith in “Doctor” Jesus is neither superstitious nor contradictory when grounded in such social and ideological understandings. This chapter explores black women's beliefs in faith healing. It is based on interviews of black women, mostly in the Detroit area, conducted between 1996 and 2003 about their understandings of faith, health, healing, and spirituality. First, it considers some of the basic issues when gender and health cross in black women's lives. Then, it looks at the crossings of medicine with the lives of African American women. Finally, it examines accounts from members of the grassroots Detroit Metropolitan Black Women's Health Project.

This book provides an ethnographic and multi-sited account of how African American women use language to negotiate the significance of hair in their everyday lives. From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, the book examines how African American women use both hair itself and language about hair as cultural resources to shape the way they see themselves and are seen by others. By exploring how women make sense of hair in the everyday and across the many places where the subject of hair is routinely taken up (for example, beauty salons, hair educational seminars, stylists' Bible study meetings, hair fashion shows, comedy clubs, Internet discussions, and cosmetology schools), the book presents situated and lived accounts of the role of hair and language in the formation of a black woman's identity. The book looks at hair care, how it takes on situated social meanings among black women, and how language both mediates and produces these social meanings.

This chapter examines multidisciplinary work on African women's and gender history between 1992 and 2010, calling this scholarship histoire engagée. After a brief overview of the development of African women's and gender history as well as African history's contributions to contemporary historical discourses, the chapter discusses the political economy of scholarly works on African women. It then analyzes Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí's argument, advanced in The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses, that all “Western” women have a preset agenda in studying “African” women that is neocolonialist and irrelevant to “African” women. It also considers issues of gender identity, sexuality, and the politicizing of women's roles by focusing on women organizing, along with the place of religion in scholarship on African women's and gender history.

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau—in March 1865. Upon its creation, the short-lived and unprecedented federal agency assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the immediate post-emancipation South. It became the embodiment of the triumphant North in a defeated South, and its agents the very face of federal authority. This bureau profoundly affected the lives of African-American women in the age of emancipation. Aside from applying the northern economic theory of free labor in a southern context, the bureau also worked to institute a social reconstruction based on northern middle-class notions of domesticity, dependency, and family relations. Whatever the intentions and actions of bureau officials stationed across the South, freedwomen—much like freedmen—encountered, trusted, and challenged the bureau and used it to their own ends. The bureau accomplished a great deal before being officially dismantled in 1872.

The diaries and correspondence of two dozen northern Protestant women offer little evidence of a close bond with a pastor unless the pastoral relationship became a marital relationship. Despite expressions of admiration for an occasional “good sermon” or a “dear pastor,” women expressed disillusionment and disappointment when pastors failed to offer effective spiritual support from the pulpit or in person in times of need. Few reported any face-to-face religious conversations with pastors; those who did recorded responses ranging from surprise to embarrassment to frustration to outrage. Cultural constructions of gender difference imposed distance in the pastoral relationship, whether women expressed it as reverence for the minister as an “ambassador of Christ,” or inchoate resentment of masculine privileges and shortcomings, or a fear of rejection, or a troubling recognition of their own romantic desire or jealousy.

This chapter covers Murray's career and writings as a young lawyer in the late 1940s through the 1950s. It explores her development of a new kind of American history and an account of black American identity as integral to her democratic thought. In response to McCarthyist insinuations that she is disloyal, she published a family memoir that portrayed her multiracial family and the history of violence against which it was formed. In the late 1950s, Murray left the United States for Ghana in search for a sense of home, but ultimately concluded that her racial identity and history made her irrevocably American.