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ABSTRACT
In May 1893, the World's Congress of Representative Women (“WCRW”) convened alongside the Chicago World's Fair to commemorate the progress of women since 1492. The speeches of six Black women were recorded in the congress proceedings: Hallie Q. Brown, Anna J. Cooper, Fanny J. Coppin, Sarah J.W. Early, Frances E. W. Harper, and Fannie B. Williams. Invited to report on Black women's progress for a primarily white audience, these women nonetheless used their speeches to advance their own goals by arguing that a proper understanding of Black women's progress requires accurate memories of emancipation and enslavement, as well as a recognition of Black women's agency. They developed these arguments using three rhetorical moves: first, they reframed the commemorative situation by establishing emancipation rather than Columbus's landing as the “zero point”; second, they claimed that Black women's progress in the present could only be understood in relation to accurate accounts of enslavement; third, they centered Black women as the agents of their own progress in the past, present, and future. Reading these speeches together reveals the resonance between nineteenth-century women and twentieth- and twenty-first century Black feminist thought, and it illuminates Black American critiques of white history.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Karrin Vasby Anderson and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. She is also grateful to Leslie Harris for reading an earlier version of the essay, to colleagues in the UWM Department of African and African Diaspora Studies for the invitation to present this research in their seminar series, and to the many students who engaged these speeches in her classrooms.
Notes on contributor
Sara C. VanderHaagen My research focuses on how members of the public use rhetoric to argue about and reshape stories about the past. I am especially interested in how public discourse about the past is affected by the dynamics of race, gender, age, and agency. Broader areas of interest include African American rhetoric, public discourse about race and gender, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical criticism.
Notes
1 Sarah J. W. Early, “The Organized Efforts of the Colored Women of the South to Improve Their Condition,” in World’s Congress of Representative Women: A Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, Convened in Chicago on May 15, and Adjourned on May 22, 1893, Under the Auspices of the Women’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, ed. May Wright Sewall (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 2:720, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/004399612. Hereafter in notes this compilation will be referred to as “WCRW.”
2 Although Florence Lewis was scheduled to speak on May 18, as the last of three respondents to Williams’s address, Sewall’s proceedings record neither a speech nor any other appearance by Lewis. It is possible that when Frederick Douglass gave his impromptu speech following Coppin, he preempted or at least overshadowed Lewis’ speech. Douglass’s speech, unlike Lewis’s speech (if it was given at all), is recorded in the proceedings. See Sewall, ed., WCRW, 1:76, 2:717. See also Kristy Maddux, Practicing Citizenship: Women’s Rhetoric at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019), 86.
3 Benjamin Cummings Truman, History of the World’s Fair: Being a Complete and Authentic Description of the Columbian Exposition from its Inception (Philadelphia: H.W. Kelley, 1893), 23.
4 “Announcement,” in WRCW, ed. Sewall, 1:v.
5 Shirley Wilson Logan, “Frances E.W. Harper, ‘Woman’s Political Future,’” Voices of Democracy 1 (2006): 46.
6 For the schedule of the General Congresses, see Sewall, WCRW, 1:76–84.
7 Much as she argued in 1866, Harper here holds that suffrage is not a “panacea,” but one political tool among many. See Logan, “Woman’s Political Future,” 48–9.
8 Logan, “Woman’s Political Future,” 43; see also Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808–1915 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 175.
9 Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 96.
10 See Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 10; Olga Idriss Davis, “A Black Woman as Rhetorical Critic: Validating Self and Violating the Space of Otherness,” Women’s Studies in Communication 21, no. 1 (1998): 77–89, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.1998.10162414; Olga Idriss Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” in Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies in Discourse, ed. Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss Davis (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002), 35–51; Shardé Davis, “Taking Back the Power: An Analysis of Black Women’s Communicative Resistance,” Review of Communication 18, no. 4 (2018): 303, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2018.1461234; Rhana A. Gittens, “‘What If I Am a Woman?’: Black Feminist Rhetorical Strategies of Intersectional Identification and Resistance in Maria Stewart’s Texts,” Southern Communication Journal 83, no. 5 (2018): 311, https://doi.org/10.1080/1041794X.2018.1505939; Houston and Davis, “Introduction,” in Centering Ourselves, 3–4; Marsha Houston Stanback, “Feminist Theory and Black Women’s Talk,” Howard Journal of Communications 1, no. 4 (1988): 188, https://doi.org/10.1080/10646178809359691.
11 Previous scholarship examined the speeches in different configurations. Shirley Wilson Logan analyzed Williams’s and Cooper’s speeches, as well as Harper’s (“Woman’s Political Future”). Laura L. Behling examined only Williams, Cooper, and Coppin. I build on both Logan and Behling’s work, but my analysis offers an alternative to Behling’s interpretation, which, in my view, overemphasized the speakers’ objectification as “exhibits,” at the expense of considering how they acted as agents. Kristy Maddux framed these speeches as part of the project of “racial uplift” and examined them alongside 10 others, including speeches by white women. Maddux’s analysis, while appropriate to her purpose, obscures the Black women’s unique positionalities and rhetorical strategies. Shirley Wilson Logan, We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth Century Black Women (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); Laura L. Behling, “Reification and Resistance: The Rhetoric of Black Womanhood at the Columbian Exposition, 1893,” Women’s Studies in Communication 25, no. 2 (2002): 173–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2002.10162445; Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 86–120.
12 For an example of research that examines the significance of the collective in interpersonal spaces, see Shardé M. Davis, “The ‘Strong Black Woman Collective’: A Developing Theoretical Framework for Understanding Collective Communication Practices of Black Women,” Women’s Studies in Communication 38, no. 1 (2015): 20–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2014.953714.
13 Brenda J. Allen, “Goals for Emancipatory Research on Black Women,” in Centering Ourselves, ed. Houston and Davis, 24.
14 Black feminist scholars remind us that Black feminist thought integrates theory and practice. As Olga Idriss Davis puts it, “To conceptualize the notion of theorizing of African American women’s discourse is to first acknowledge that people of color have always theorized, but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic.” “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 42.
15 Rosalyn Collings Eves, “A Recipe for Remembrance: Memory and Identity in African-American Women’s Cookbooks,” Rhetoric Review 24, no. 3 (2005): 280–97, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327981rr2403_3; Patricia G. Davis, “The Other Southern Belles: Civil War Reenactment, African American Women, and the Performance of Idealized Femininity,” Text and Performance Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2012): 308–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2012.707783. A handful of historical studies exist: see Joan Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone’: African American Women’s Clubs, the Frederick Douglass Home, and the Black Mammy Monument,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 1 (2005): 62–86, 210, https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2005.0009; and Michele Paige McElya, “Monumental Citizenship: Reading the National Mammy Memorial Controversy of the Early Twentieth Century” (PhD diss., New York University, 2003).
16 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 298.
17 This is also closely aligned with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s articulation of agency in “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2005): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/1479142042000332134.
18 In Feminism is for Everybody, bell hooks characterizes women’s agency as “the power to be self-defining” (95). Philosopher Alisa Bierria develops a particularly compelling explication of the role that self-definition and -determination play in Black feminist conceptions of agency. She explains that “racist authoring of black agentic action evacuates black agents’ self-generated explanation from their actions, replacing it with intentions and explanations constructed through the living archive and sanctioned by institutional racism.” Black agents, Bierria concludes, thus become “missing in action” and the only remedy is self-definition. hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency,” Hypatia 29, no. 1 (2014): 134, https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12074. See also Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38–9; Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302.
19 Jennifer C. Nash, “Practicing Love: Black Feminism, Love-Politics, and Post-Intersectionality,” Meridians 11, no. 2 (2011): 14, https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.11.2.1.
20 D. Soyini Madison, “‘That Was My Occupation’: Oral Narrative, Performance, and Black Feminist Thought,” Text and Performance Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1993): 230, https://doi.org/10.1080/10462939309366051. See also Brenda J. Allen, “Black Womanhood and Feminist Standpoints,” Management Communication Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1998): 577, https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0893318998114004; Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302–4; Gittens, “‘What If I Am a Woman?’” 310.
21 Patricia Hill Collins, “No Guarantees: Symposium on Black Feminist Thought,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 38, no. 13 (2015): 2350, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2015.1058512.
22 Houston and Davis, “Introduction,” in Centering Ourselves, ed. Houston and Davis, 13; Houston Stanback, “Feminist Theory and Black Women’s Talk,” 188. Having described the emphasis on self-definition in Black feminist thought, I think it necessary to acknowledge the tension produced when a scholar who identifies as a white woman, such as myself, advances an interpretation of Black women’s words and actions. Lacking what Bierria describes as “self-generated explanation” (134) from these historical Black women, I look to implicit theorizing in their speeches and rely on the explanation of contemporary Black feminist thinkers to guide this analysis. This analysis attempts to treat Black women as “active agents who interpret their own and others’ discourse.”
23 Ann Massa, “Black Women in the ‘White City,’” Journal of American Studies 8, no. 3 (1974): 319; Robert W. Rydell, “World’s Columbian Exposition,” Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago Historical Society, 2005), http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1386.html.
24 Speakers variously used the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the 13th Amendment (1865) to mark emancipation.
25 Christopher Robert Reed, “All the World is Here!”: The Black Presence at White City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), xxii, 52–3. Quoting St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton.
26 The most well-known critique was The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World’s Columbian Exhibition, written by Ida B. Wells and others. See Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 99–104; Anna R. Paddon and Sally Turner, “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Illinois Historical Journal 88, no. 1 (1995): 19; and Reed, All the World, xi–xiv.
27 Massa, “Black Women,” 331; Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981), 103–24; Reed, All the World, 26–30.
28 Reed, All the World, 27.
29 Massa, “Black Women,” 329. Reed claimed that Palmer’s decision was opportunistic and political, and Weimann believed it was influenced by the need to appease the powerful Southern white women; Reed, All the World, 29; Weimann, The Fair Women, 104. See also Paddon and Turner, “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” 22.
30 Quoted in Temple Bryonny Tsenes-Hills, “I Am the Utterance of My Name: Black Victorian Feminist Discourse and Intellectual Enterprise at the Columbian Exposition, 1893” (PhD diss., Loyola University Chicago, 2004), 193. For the full text, see Hallie Q. Brown, “A Great Slight to the Race,” The Indianapolis Freeman, 30 April 1892. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=FIkAGs9z2eEC&dat=18920430&printsec=frontpage&hl=en. While the Board viewed Brown’s decision as petty, Brown could have perceived the small position as both inadequate to her aspirations and woefully undercompensated. See Massa, “Black Women,” 333; Weimann, The Fair Women, 117–19.
31 Reed, All the World, 30. At the state level, Joan Imogen Howard nearly singlehandedly orchestrated the substantive inclusion of African American work in the New York state exhibit. Harper served in a nominal role on the WCRW “Home Advisory Council.” See Sewall, WCRW, 2:934.
32 African American women were visible elsewhere: Williams also spoke at the Congress on Africa and Brown performed at “Colored American Day”; Reed, All the World, 17, 102, 138. Unlike these women, Wells wrote her critique from an external position, as she boycotted the fair’s events.
33 Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Cindy Koenig Richards have noted that women have often had to cloak radical arguments in conventional garb; see Campbell, “Gender and Genre: Loci of Invention and Contradiction in the Earliest Speeches by U.S. Women,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 4 (1995): 479–95, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639509384130; Richards, “Inventing Sacagawea: Public Women and the Transformative Potential of Epideictic Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 73, no. 1 (2009): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570310802635013.
34 Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 11. The few book-length studies of African American women’s rhetoric from the field of rhetorical studies and communication have also attested to the significance of some or all of these six women. See Deborah F. Atwater, African American Women’s Rhetoric: The Search for Dignity, Personhood, and Honor (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 3; Jacqueline Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 289–93; Logan, We Are Coming.
35 Jones Royster, Traces of a Stream, 178.
36 Frances Smith Foster, “Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins,” in Black Women in America, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2:22–5.
37 Linda M. Perkins, “Coppin, Fannie Jackson,” in Black Women in America, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:312–14.
38 Reed, All the World, 17.
39 I use the adjective “enslaved” to denote a potentially temporary, externally imposed condition rather than the term “slave,” which defines the person so named primarily by their enslavement rather than their humanity. This choice follows that of many journalists and historians who write about this time period, and it is guided by the ideal of “people first” language promoted by contemporary advocates for people with disabilities.
40 Lemert, “Cooper, Anna Julia,” in Black Women in America, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:308–12.
41 Vivian Njeri Fisher, “Brown, Hallie Quinn,” in Black Women in America, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1:168–70.
42 Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 18.
43 Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 87.
44 Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 86.
45 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 332. Blight provides a nuanced overview of the controversies over progress in the Black community, but his account is limited by its near-exclusive focus on Black men. An examination of these women’s speeches provides an important correction and addition to Blight’s argument.
46 Blight, Race and Reunion, 319, 321.
47 Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 111.
48 “Not Lost Sight Of. The Afro-American is Gradually Being Brought into the Fair,” Plaindealer (Detroit), March 24, 1893, p. 1, America’s Historical Newspapers.
49 Fannie Barrier Williams, “The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States Since the Emancipation Proclamation,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:696.
50 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:696.
51 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:697, 704.
52 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:704.
53 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:704.
54 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:697.
55 Here Williams is offering a subtle critique of white women, but in other sections she praises them as “saintly” (697) and compares Black women to them. Such passages illustrate Williams’s investment in respectability politics. We can also see Williams’s class prejudice in passages lamenting white Americans’ inability to differentiate between the Black elite and what she described as the “non-progressive peasants of the ‘black belt’ of the South” (705). Behling (2010) interpreted such choices as Williams denying her racial identity in favor of identification with her white female audiences. While I agree that this is quite problematic, I contend that Williams did this strategically to gain the trust of white women and thus utilized her position to become a more amenable messenger for radical ideas. For further discussion of the issue of the social distinctions among Gilded Age Black Americans, see Reed, All the World, 37–53.
56 Cooper’s characterization of the process of progress resonates strongly with Nash’s description of work in black feminist love-politics in “Practicing Love.”
57 Anna Julia Cooper, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:712.
58 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:712.
59 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:713.
60 Fannie Jackson Coppin, “Discussion Continued,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:716.
61 Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:715.
62 Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:715.
63 Frederick Douglass, who had been seated on the platform during the session, followed Coppin’s address with a brief impromptu response. He articulated a strong break between past and present and appropriated the apocalyptic biblical language of Ecclesiastes and Revelation to herald the arrival of a new order; see Sewall, 717. Reed noted that Douglass’s statement would have had particular impact as he was the only man to address the Congress since the opening remarks. Reed, All the World, 124.
64 Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:723.
65 Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:723.
66 Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:723.
67 I counted six references to specific amounts of time (e.g., “thirty years”) and 12 general references (e.g., “centuries,” “the age”). This enumeration is inspired by Prasch’s “rhetorical theory of deixis,” which “is concerned with how a speaker defines his/her rhetorical act within both sense of time (chronos and kairos), place, and space-time while also attending to the ways a discourse might change over time in accordance with historical events, moments that often define, and are defined by, their placement”; Allison M. Prasch, “Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Deixis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 174, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2016.1156145.
68 Hallie Q. Brown, “Discussion of the Same Subject,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:725.
69 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:726.
70 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:728.
71 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:729.
72 Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 1:434.
73 Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 168.
74 Blight, Race and Reunion, 313.
75 Leslie A. Schwalm, “‘Agonizing Groans of Mothers’ and ‘Slave-Scarred Veterans’: The Commemoration of Slavery and Emancipation,” American Nineteenth Century History 9, no. 3 (2008): 291, https://doi.org/10.1080/14664650802288407.
76 See Blight, Race and Reunion, 311–19; Bethany Johnston, “Freedom and Slavery in the Voice of the Negro: Historical Memory and African-American Identity, 1904–1907,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2000): 30–4; Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, 148; Leslie A. Schwalm, “Emancipation Day Celebrations: The Commemoration of Slavery and Freedom in Iowa,” Annals of Iowa 62, no. 3 (2003): 293, https://doi.org/10.17077/0003-4827.10708.
77 I would like to thank Ashley R. Hall for a conversation that helped me to conceptualize the idea of the negative in these speeches.
78 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:701.
79 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:698, 701.
80 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:701.
81 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:703.
82 Maddux claims that racial uplift discourses often reframed Blacks’ supposed inferiority from biological—a common white view—to environmental; Maddux, Practicing Citizenship, 95.
83 It is important to note that Williams’s elite position constrained her ability to recognize enslaved Black women as survivors rather than mere victims.
84 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:712.
85 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:712.
86 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:712.
87 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:711, 713.
88 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:719.
89 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:719.
90 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:720.
91 Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:716; Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 1:435.
92 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:724.
93 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:724.
94 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:724.
95 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:724.
96 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:725.
97 A sampling of the considerable work on agency in Black feminist thought includes: Bierria, “Missing in Action”; Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 229–51; Collins, “No Guarantees,” 2349–50; Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism (New York: Routledge, 2017); Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 301–3; Darlene Clark Hine, “African American Women and Their Communities in the Twentieth Century: The Foundation and Future of Black Women’s Studies,” Black Women, Gender + Families 1, no. 1 (2007): 1–23; hooks, Feminism is for Everybody, 95.
98 Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 21. See also Gittens, “‘What If I Am a Woman?’” 318.
99 Madison, “‘That Was My Occupation,’” 229.
100 See Bierria, “Missing in Action,” 135; Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 30, 93, 112–13; Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38–9; hooks, Feminism is for Everybody, 95.
101 Davis, “Taking Back the Power,” 302. Emphasis added.
102 Nash, “Practicing Love,” 16.
103 Williams’s use of the phrase “slight tinge” may also betray her color prejudice and internalization of white beauty norms.
104 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:706.
105 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:711.
106 Brown, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:728.
107 Ibid.
108 Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:712.
109 Williams, “The Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:700.
110 Williams, “The Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:699.
111 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:719; Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:700; Cooper, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:714. While the language of self-help can be problematic if it blames the oppressed for their oppression, in these instances the women use it as a means of focusing on Black women’s action as an engine for progress.
112 As Kirt Wilson has shown, the “racial politics of imitation” during this time period were complex, with many whites (and some people of color) viewing Black Americans as “natural” mimics, but unable to internalize imitated virtues. Black Americans, on the other hand, saw imitation of good qualities as a means of uplifting their race. This latter enactment of imitation by Blacks, Wilson notes, became threatening to whites, revealing the progressive potential in a seemingly regressive idea. See Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003): 89–108, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630308178.
113 Coppin, “Discussion,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:716. Emphasis added.
114 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:719.
115 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:719. Emphasis added.
116 Early, “The Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:720.
117 Ibid.
118 Nash, “Practicing Love,” 18.
119 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:700.
120 Williams, “Intellectual Progress,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:700–1.
121 Early, “Organized Efforts,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 2:723.
122 Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 1:433.
123 Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 1:435.
124 Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in WCRW, ed. Sewell, 1:437. Emphasis added.
125 Patricia Hill Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas,” Annual Review of Sociology 41 (2015): 8, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-073014-112142.
126 Collins, “No Guarantees,” 2350.
127 Weimann, Fair Women, 523–32.
128 Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 279, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570319009374343.
129 John Angus Campbell, “Between the Fragment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetorical House of the Middle Way,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54, no. 3 (1990): 347, https://doi.org/10.1080/10570319009374347.
130 Barbara Biesecker, “Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women into the History of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25, no. 2 (1992): 140–61; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak for Her Either,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26, no. 2 (1993): 153–9; Biesecker, “Negotiating with our Tradition: Reflecting Again (Without Apologies) on the Feminization of Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26, no. 3 (1993): 136–41.
131 Biesecker, “Coming to Terms,” 143.
132 Campbell, “Biesecker Cannot Speak,” 155.
133 Campbell, “Between the Fragment and the Icon,” 347.
134 While I am not persuaded by Biesecker’s whole critique of Campbell’s pioneering work on women’s rhetoric, it nonetheless rightly notes that feminist recovery work risks sinking into female tokenism when it argues that only exceptional (read: masculinized) women are worthy of attention.
135 “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html?searchResultPosition=1, accessed October 12, 2020; Kate Schuster et al, Teaching Hard History, Southern Poverty Law Center, January 31, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history.
136 Jake Silverstein, “Why We Published The 1619 Project,” New York Times, December 20, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/magazine/1619-intro.html.
137 Lisa A. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization: The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 5, 17, https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2016.1183871.
138 Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38.
139 Davis, “Theorizing African American Women’s Discourse,” 38; Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 5.
140 Collins, “Intersectionality’s Definitional Dilemmas”; Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined, 5.
141 On the term “race women,” see Cooper, Beyond Respectability, 11–31.
142 Ashley R. Hall, “Slippin’ In and Out of Frame: An Afrafuturist Feminist Orientation to Black Women and American Citizenship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 106, no. 3 (2020): 344, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2020.1785630.
143 Nash, “Practicing Love,” 19.