Introduction

Brown Beauty ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Laila Haidarali
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Class Membership ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Prominent Response

This book interrogates the multiple meanings of brown as reference to physical complexion in the representation of African American womanhood during the interwar years. It questions how and why color in general and brownness in particular came to intimate race, class, gender, and sex identity as one prominent response to modernity and urbanization. This book shows that throughout the interwar years, diverse sets of African American women and men, all of whom can be defined as middle class within this constituency’s widely varying class membership, privileged brown complexions in their reworking of ideas, images, and expressions to identify the representative bodies of women as modern New Negro women.

Race Women

2019 ◽  
pp. 70-100
Author(s):  
Jelani M. Favors
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Single Sex ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the fascinating history of Bennett College – one of only two single sex colleges dedicated to educating African American women. Although Bennett would not make that transition until 1926, the institution played a vital role in educating African American women in Greensboro, North Carolina from the betrayal of the Nadir to the promises of a New Negro Era. The latter period witnessed Bennett, under the leadership of David Dallas Jones, mold scores of young girls into politically conscious race women who were encouraged to resist Jim Crow policies and reject the false principals of white supremacy. Their politicization led to a massive boycott of a theatre in downtown Greensboro and helped to set the tone for Greensboro’s evolution into a critical launching point for the modern civil rights movement.

Fannie Barrier Williams, the New Negro, and Black Feminist Pragmatism, 1893–1926

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-77
Author(s):  
Mary Jo Deegan
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Political Advocacy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
The New Woman

Fannie Barrier Williams brilliantly analyzed and participated in the tumultuous changes in black Chicago from 1887-1926. She specialized in essays and political advocacy for African American women. She compared them to “the new woman” and “the New Negro,” and by 1895, she had defined African American women as uniquely combining the characteristics of both groups. She also employed the concepts and ideas of pragmatists and feminist pragmatists and brought black women’s ideas and experiences to this social theory.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Gender Specific

In search of greater educational, employment, social, political, and cultural opportunities, many African American women migrated to Washington with formerly unimaginable aspirations and expectations for themselves. Colored No More establishes this search as formative to a New Negro ethos.The introductory chapter defines “New Negro” and constructs a gender-specific understanding of this historical era and identity, while introducing Washington as both a unique and a representative site for the emergence of New Negro womanhood. Challenging the temporal primacy on the Interwar period in New Negro studies, the introduction asserts the importance of examining the lives of African American women to revisit how we conceptualize the “New Negro.” This chapter also deconstructs our understanding of “colored” as simply a racial marker- gender mattered in how Blackness was experienced during the New Negro era. In search of greater educational, employment, social, political, and cultural opportunities, many African American women migrated to Washington with formerly unimaginable aspirations and expectations for themselves.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
New Negro ◽  
Exclusionary Practices ◽  
American Women ◽  
Marginalized Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Upper South

This book focuses on African American women, and more specifically, African American womanhood to complicate a masculinist conceptualization of “New Negro,” both historically and historiographically. The usage of a feminist historical approach to the New Negro era and to the early twentieth century urban upper south uncovers a new history of African American struggles for freedom and equality through exploring Jim and Jane Crow exclusionary practices. Applying this approach to explorations of historically marginalized communities can reveal untold stories. Moreover, African American women’s expressivity and creation of counterpublics remain ripe sites for critical interventions for women’s historians and feminist scholars. By challenging and expanding how we think about expressivity, we enrich our understandings of the historical experiences and the distinct political and cultural contributions of African American women in the shaping the United States.

Climbing the Hilltop

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Gender Ideologies ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Howard University ◽  
Dean Of Women

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Howard University emerged as the premier institution for higher learning for African Americans. Using the life of Lucy Diggs Slowe, a Howard alumnus and the first Dean of Women at Howard, this chapter discusses the experiences of African American women at Howard during the early twentieth century to illustrate how New Negro women negotiated intra-racial gender ideologies and conventions as well as Jim Crow racial politics. Although women could attend and work at Howard, extant African American gender ideologies often limited African American women’s opportunities as students, faculty, and staff. Slowe was arguably the most vocal advocate for African American women at Howard. She demanded that African American women be prepared for the “modern world,” and that African American women be full and equal participants in public culture. Her thirty-plus years affiliation with Howard makes her an ideal subject with which to map the emergence of New Negro womanhood at this prestigious university. This chapter presents Howard as an elite and exclusive site for the actualization of New Negro womanhood while simultaneously asserting the symbolic significance of Howard University for African American women living in and moving to Washington. Although most African American women in Washington could not and did not attend or work at Howard, this institution was foundational to an emergent sense of possibility and aspiration that propelled the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women in New Negro era Washington.

Colored No More

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Treva B. Lindsey
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Expressive Culture ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Public Cultures

Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. examines the expressive culture of African American women in Washington, D.C. during the early twentieth century. Honing in on the intellectual and cultural strivings of African American women communities in New Negro era Washington, I unveil a city in which African American women sought to configure themselves as authorial subjects. Between 1860 and 1930, the population of black women in Washington increased from 8.402 to 69,843. Over the course of seventy years of African American women’s migration to the nation’s capital, numerous institutions, organizations, and political, social, and cultural arenas emerged in Washington that catered to the specific needs, desires, and interests of a rapidly growing population of black women. African American women established spaces for contesting political, social and cultural currents and conventions that limited black women’s participation in the public sphere. Many of these women defiantly entered into public cultures such as higher education, literary activism, and local and interstate commerce. New Negro women challenged racial, gender, and sexual ideologies and norms that often relegated African American women to subordinate political, social, and cultural statuses. Colored No More reveals the significance of Washington, D.C. as a New Negro city. The African American women who inhabited the nation’s capital were integral to African American freedom and equality struggles of the early twentieth century.

To Be Female, Middle Class, Anxious, and Black

2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 129-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Angela M. Neal-Barnett ◽  
Janis H. Crowther
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Panic Disorder ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Anxiety Disorders ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Help Seeking ◽  
General Category ◽  
Sleep Paralysis ◽  
American Women ◽  
Isolated Sleep Paralysis

Women of color theorists have suggested that the double minority status of gender and ethnicity places African American women at higher risk for anxiety. However, little information is available about anxiety disorders among African American women. The existing literature subsumes Black women under the general category of African Americans and focuses on low-income samples. In this study, we examine the manifestation of panic disorder in a sample of 15 predominantly middle-class African American women. We then compare these women to a group of 35 predominantly middle-class African American women without panic disorder on several factors, including presence of isolated sleep paralysis, presence of other anxiety disorders, help-seeking behavior, and victimization. Results indicate that African American women with panic disorder experienced isolated sleep paralysis, and that both groups had high levels of sexual victimization. Help-seeking among women with panic and other anxiety disorders was limited to relationship difficulties, sexual assault, and bereavement.

The Tight Cocoon

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Foley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
New Negro ◽  
American Women ◽  
New Negro Movement

This chapter looks at how Toomer was more intimately involved with the New Negro Movement than he was able to acknowledge in his early 1920s correspondence with white modernists. Toomer was particularly influenced by a circle of African American women he had known from his youth, and whose writings—which were significantly influenced by postwar leftist debates—would shape Toomer's representations of womanhood and motherhood in Cane. Moreover, although attracted from 1920 onward by the notion of an “American race” transcending racial binaries, during the entire Cane period Toomer had no qualms about identifying himself as a Negro under conditions of his own choosing. As with Toomer's views on class politics, it is imperative to read forward through his early writings in order to determine the racial ideas that shaped the composition of Cane.

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