Press, Platform, Pulpit: Black Feminist Publics in the Era of Reform

377 Pages·2011·2.01 MB·English

by  Teresa Zackodnik

Press,
Platform,
Pulpit

Press,
Platform,
Pulpit
Black Feminist Publics
in the Era of Reform
Teresa Zackodnik
The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville
[
Copyright © 2011 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville.
All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zackodnik, Teresa C.
Press, platform, pulpit: Black feminist publics in the era of reform / Teresa Zackodnik.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-57233-826-5 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-57233-826-1 (alk. paper)
1. Feminism—United States—History—19th century.
2. African American feminists—History—19th century.
3. African American social reformers—History—19th century.
4. African American clergy—History—19th century.
I. Title.
HQ1423.Z33 2011
305.48'896073009034—dc23
2011021560
For Ailsa Brazeau,
whose hero is Rosa Parks

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Going Public: African American Feminism in the Era of
Reform xiii
Chapter 1. Soul Winners and Sanctified Sisters: Nineteenth-Century
African American Preaching Women 1
Chapter 2. Internationalizing Black Feminisms: Ellen Craft, Sarah Parker
Remond, and American Slavery in the British Isles and Ireland 49
Chapter 3. “I don’t know how you will feel when I get through”: Racial
Difference, Symbolic Value, and Sojourner Truth 93
Chapter 4. The Platform, the Pamphlet, and the Press: Ida B. Wells’s
Pedagogy of American Lynching 131
Chapter 5. “We must be up and doing”: Feminist Black Nationalism in
the Press 167
Conclusion: Feminist Affiliations in a Divisive Climate: Anna Julia
Cooper’s “Woman versus the Indian” 225
Notes 249
Works Cited 295
Index 319
Illustrations
Following Page 123
Jarena Lee (1783–?)
Amanda Berry Smith (1837–1915)
Sarah Parker Remond (1826–1892)
Sojourner Truth (ca. 1797–1883)
Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)
Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823–1893)
Victoria Earle Mathews (1861–1907)
Fannie Barrier Williams (1855–1944)
Josephine Silone Yates (1859–1912)
Frances Harper (1825–1911)
Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964)
Acknowledgments
My seven-year-old daughter recently declared, though I need no reminding,
that “an important history” is represented in this book. She’s right, of course.
And I’m mindful that it marks, inevitably, only a partial sense of the aston-
ishing work these women undertook, just as I’m mindful that there were
so many more women laboring for black feminist causes at this time about
whom we know little or nothing. Yet learning what I have been able to about
the work of early black feminists and their context has been a fascinating
process and a rich pleasure for which I am grateful; I can’t imagine any other
work being as interesting or as sustaining over a number of years as this was.
Like any book, this one owes many thanks and carries many debts, the
largest of which is to those African American women who risked so much to
keep “the colored woman” at the center of reform debates in the nineteenth
century. Their work was essential to the well being of black communities, spe-
cifically, and of the country more generally, in ways that reach beyond their
own moment and into ours. We would know little of their labors were it not
for the recovery work undertaken over the past several decades, scholarship
that paves the way for and enables further studies like this one that begin to
question the historiographies created from that recovered material and begin
to look anew at figures we have known for some time alongside those who are
new to us. Without the formidable scholarship on the black church, aboli-
tion, woman’s rights, suffrage, anti-lynching, and the black press, studies like
this are not possible.
This book and the archival research undertaken for it were funded by a
research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada (SSHRC). SSHRC funded the research assistance of several people
who made the project possible, and I am grateful as well to the Department
of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta for also providing
essential research assistance for this project. For their research skills, I thank
Jackie Baker, Michael Borshuk, Mridula Chakraborty, Karen Engle, Heather
Kitteringham, Ross Langager, Christie Schultz, and Vivian Zenari. Finally,