“Upon You They Depend for the Light of Knowledge”: Women and Children in the Rhetoric of Mary Church Terrell

Abstract

In her position as both teacher and administrator in the late nineteenth century, Mary Church Terrell navigated the racism and sexism of an increasingly bureaucratic educational landscape to emerge as a powerful, activist voice for children. Through a closer look at the strategies she and others used to advocate for social uplift via children and the home, we can continue to uncover the uneven rhetorical terrain black women navigated as they advocated for youth within an environment that constructed black children as outside of normative conceptions of childhood.

Notes

¹ Sincere thanks to RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Shirley Wilson Logan for their generous feedback. I also want to thank Jamie A. Lee, Adela C. Licona, and Maggie M. Werner for their support.

² I focus on a period of U.S. history commonly understood as the Progressive Era—1890 until the end of World War I in 1917. However, I refer to the period as the “late nineteenth century.” Here, I underscore Elisabeth Israel Perry’s argument that the term “progressive” hardly describes the “regressive” sociopolitical materialities that affected minoritized peoples living in the U.S. during the late nineteenth century.

³ In Liberating Language, Shirley Wilson Logan draws on Ralph Ellison’s insights about “free-floating literacy” to explore the sites of literacy production that black communities cultivated outside of formal educational contexts and domestic spaces.

⁴ For more on professionalization, identity, and teaching minoritized students in the context of nineteenth-century pedagogy, see Jessica Enoch’s Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African American, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865-1911.

⁵ Specifically, Gould cites the example of Sarah Baartman, a South African Khoikhoi woman who was forcibly exhibited in the service of European scientific racism.

⁶ On racial bias and the dehumanization of black youth, see “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children” by Goff et al.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Londie T. Martin

Londie T. Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock where her teaching focuses on digital narrative and multimodality. As a feminist rhetorician, her interdisciplinary research emphasizes the role of the body and sensate engagement in new media and performance contexts. Her co-authored webtext titled “Performing Urgency” was published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and won the journal’s 2016 Best Webtext Award. She serves on the editorial board for Feminist Formations, a leading academic journal in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.