Brittney C. Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252040993
- eISBN:
- 9780252099540
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040993.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on ...
More
In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class.
Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.Less
In the late nineteenth century, a group of publicly active African American women emerged from the social and educational elite to assume racial leadership roles. Their work challenged thinking on racial issues as well as questions about gender, sexuality, and class.
Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.
Brittney C. Cooper
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780252040993
- eISBN:
- 9780252099540
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040993.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
What does it mean and what has it meant to be a Black female intellectual? What does it mean to be a race woman? When and where are the sites of race women’s becoming? Brittney Cooper argues that to ...
More
What does it mean and what has it meant to be a Black female intellectual? What does it mean to be a race woman? When and where are the sites of race women’s becoming? Brittney Cooper argues that to arrive at an answer to the first question, we must diligently interrogate and examine the latter questions. Race women were the first Black women intellectuals. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after Reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to “proving the intellectual character” of the race. Pauline Hopkins declared two key tasks attached to the work of the “true race-woman.” They were “to study” and “to discuss” “all phases of the race question.” Not only were these women institution builders and activists; they declared themselves public thinkers on race questions. Though Hopkins and her colleagues were part of a critical mass of public Black women thinkers in the 1890s, they joined a longer list of Black women who had been at the forefront of debates over “the woman question” and the role of Black women in public life throughout the 1800s.Less
What does it mean and what has it meant to be a Black female intellectual? What does it mean to be a race woman? When and where are the sites of race women’s becoming? Brittney Cooper argues that to arrive at an answer to the first question, we must diligently interrogate and examine the latter questions. Race women were the first Black women intellectuals. As they entered into public racial leadership roles beyond the church in the decades after Reconstruction, they explicitly fashioned for themselves a public duty to serve their people through diligent and careful intellectual work and attention to “proving the intellectual character” of the race. Pauline Hopkins declared two key tasks attached to the work of the “true race-woman.” They were “to study” and “to discuss” “all phases of the race question.” Not only were these women institution builders and activists; they declared themselves public thinkers on race questions. Though Hopkins and her colleagues were part of a critical mass of public Black women thinkers in the 1890s, they joined a longer list of Black women who had been at the forefront of debates over “the woman question” and the role of Black women in public life throughout the 1800s.
