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This chapter examines the life and work of African American writer Gertrude Bustill Mossell in the mid-1880s, with particular emphasis on her two-year editorship of the advice column, “Our Woman's Department,” for the New York Freeman. It first provides a background on the Bustill and Mossell family histories before discussing Mossell's editorship of the woman's column of the New York Freeman using her professional name, Mrs. N. F. Mossell. It then explains how Mossell used her column, published between 1886 and 1887, to promote models of public citizenship that widened the boundaries of black women's purposefulness in the postbellum period. Tackling topics ranging from child care to education, Mossell encouraged parents to view their daughters as useful members of the household and advised black girls to negotiate equal relationships with employers. The chapter also explores the complex and multivalent views of the present and future prospects for black girls Mossell offered in her columns.

This book analyzes writing about black girls in the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries. It asks why black writers of the period conveyed racial inequality, poverty, and discrimination through the lens of black girlhood; why black writers and activists emphasized certain types of girls; what tropes can be identified in the early literature of black girlhood; and where these girlhood tropes originated. The book draws on sources from some of the earliest black newspapers and on fiction, including the newspaper advice columns of Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Frances E. W. Harper's novel Trial and Triumph, and conduct books for black children. It thus unveils the possibilities for disciplinary intersections between African American literature, print culture, and black girlhood studies. The texts it examines reveal what it refers to as a genealogy of black girlhood.

Chapter 6 charts the changing importance of home as a cultural ideal at the turn of the century and considers the challenges posed by feminism, suburbanization, technology, and a growing focus on personality and privacy. To that end, the documents in this concluding chapter do not record the end of the nineteenth-century home but instead reveal various attempts to think outside of it. Edward Bellamy, Helen Campbell, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman challenge the efficiency of the private home, dismissing it as primitive and calling for modernization. Gertrude Bustill Mossell and A. L. Hall reject the conflation of home and gender roles that constrain women and men. Documents by Mary Abbott, Henry Wilson, and Martha Bensley Bruère celebrate the comfort, informality, and openness offered by the bungalow home and labor-saving devices. Finally, reformer Michael M. Davis, Jr. and the Industrial Housing Associates highlight the interdependence of home and commercial life and spaces for the working class.