Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life Their Words, Their Thoughts, Their Feelings

9780271005072

0271005076

A selection from the writings of two dozen representative Black women leaders of the past century, with a general introduction relating them to their forebears in colonial times and to their descendants in the 20th century. Each selection is introduced with a biographical headnote, and there is a bibliography of works by or about these women and other Black women.The selections are grouped in four parts, emphasizing respectively: family relationships, religious activities, political and reformist movements, and education. The women represented in this book comprise a cross section of historically significant Black women in the 19th century: ten were born free, eight were freed before the Civil War, and six were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation; eight were born in the North and sixteen in the South. Their names are Annie Louise Burton, Anna Julia Cooper, Fanny Jackson Coppin, Cornelia, Ellen Craft, Silvia Dubois, Elleanor Eldridge, Elizabeth, Charlotte Forten Grimke, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Keckley, Lucy Craft Laney, Jarena Lee, Louisa Picquet, Ann Plato, Nancy Prince, Sarah Parker Remond, Amanda Berry Smith, Maria Stewart, Susie King Taylor, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Ida Wells-Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams.The late Bert J. Loewenberg was the Esther Raushenbush Professor in the Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College and the author or co-author of seven books on American history and Darwinian evolution. Ruth Bogin, who teaches American History at Pace University, is the author of Sarah Parker Remond: Black Abolitionist from Salem. Professor Loewenberg did his undergraduate work at Clark and took his Ph.D. at Harvard: Professor Bogin has studied at Wisconsin, Sarah Lawrence, and Union Graduate School.