scholarly journals African American Women Scholars and International Research: Dr. Anna Julia Cooper’s Legacy of Study Abroad

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Y. Evans
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Study Abroad ◽  
African American Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women's Tradition ◽  
Intellectual Production

In this article, a little-known but detailed history of Black women’s tradition of study abroad is presented. Specifically, the story of Dr. Anna Julia Cooper is situated within the landscape of historic African American students who studied in Japan, Germany, Jamaica, England, Italy, Haiti, India, West Africa, and Thailand, in addition to France. The story of Cooper’s intellectual production is especially intriguing because, at a time when Black women were just beginning to pursue doctorates in the United States, Anna Cooper chose to earn her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne in Paris. In this article, it is demonstrated that her research agenda and institutional choice reflected a popular trend of Black academics to construct their scholarly identities with an international foundation. The intersection of race, gender, nationality, language, and culture are critical areas of inquiry from which to study higher education. 

scholarly journals African American Women and Domestic Violence: Addressing their Voice of Silence

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernice Kennedy ◽  
Chalice Rhodes (Former Jenkins)
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Domestic Violence ◽  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
American Women ◽  
Strong Black Women

Abstract Historically, during slavery, the international slave trade promoted normalization of violence against African American women. During slavery, African American women endured inhuman conditions because of the majority race views of them as being over-sexualized, physically strong, and immoral. This perception of the African American women as being highly sexual and more sexual than white women results in slave owner justifying their sexual violation and degrading of the African American women. The stereotypical representations of African American women as strong, controlling, dangerous, fearless, and invulnerable may interfere with the African American women receiving the needed services for domestic violence in the community. The Strong Black Women Archetype has been dated back to slavery describing their coping mechanism in dealing with oppression by developing a strong, less traditionally female role. The authors developed a model: The Multidimensional Perspectives of Factors Contributing to Domestic Violence of African American Women in the United States. This model depicts historically, the factors contributing to domestic violence of African American women in the United States. Also, this model addressed the African American women subscribing to the Strong Black Women Archetype to cope with domestic violence. Despite the increase in domestic violence in African American women, they focused more on the issue of racism instead of sexism in America. African American women have experienced the two obstacles of racism and sexism in America. However, African American women and men believe racism is more critical than sexism. Therefore, domestic violence in the African American population may remain silent because of cultural loyalty. However, the voice of silence of African American females is gradually changing with the upcoming generations.

Michelle Obama, the Media Circus, and America’s Racial Obsession

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitch Kachun
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
First Ladies ◽  
Cable News ◽  
Michelle Obama ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Media ◽  
Political Attack

This chapter shifts the focus to Michelle Obama, a figure whose family's experiences of enslavement, emancipation, and northward migration make her nearly as important a cultural figure as her husband. It explains how media coverage of Michelle Obama during the campaign was shaped not only by Americans' expectations of prospective first ladies, but by a long history of powerful stereotypes of black women and their bodies. While praised and admired by many, Michelle Obama had become a target whose attackers utilized an ever-expanding twenty-four/seven cable news cycle and the unprecedented forum of the blogosphere to promulgate every sort of personal and political attack. In the process, they dredged up deep-seated stereotypes of African American women—the domineering “mammy,” the hypersexualized “jezebel,” the more recently minted “angry black woman”—and used them to construct an unappealing and even threatening image of the candidate's wife.

African American Women and Feminism in the 19th Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Zackodnik
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Mutual Aid ◽  
Feminist Activism ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
American Women ◽  
Woman's Rights

What in contemporary parlance we would call African American feminisms has been a politics and activism communal in its orientation, addressing the rights and material conditions of women, men, and children since the first Dutch slaver brought captive Africans to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. Although Black women would not have used the terms “feminist” or “feminism,” which did not enter into use until what is recognized now as the first wave of feminism, scholars have been using those terms for the past two decades to refer to Black women’s activism in the United States stretching at least as far back as the 1830s with the oratory and publications of Maria Stewart and the work of African American women in abolition and church reform. Alongside and in many ways enabled by crucial forms of resistance to slavery, Black women developed forms of feminist activism and a political culture that advanced claims for freedom and rights in a number of arenas. Yet our historical knowledge of 19th-century Black feminist activism has been limited by historiographical tendencies. Histories of American feminism have tended to marginalize Black feminisms by positioning these activists as contributing to a white-dominant narrative, focused on woman’s rights and suffrage. The literature on African American feminism has tended to hail the Black women’s club movement of the late 19th century as the emergence of that politics. Though many people may recognize only a handful of 19th-century African American feminists by name and reputation, early Black feminism was multiply located and extensive in its work. African American women continued the voluntary work that benevolent and mutual aid societies had begun in the late 18th century and established literary societies during the early 19th century; they entered Black nationalist debates over emigration and advocated for the self-sufficiency and education of their communities, including women; and they fought to end slavery and the repressive racialized violence that accompanied it in free states and continued through the nadir. Throughout the century, African American feminists negotiated competing and often conflicting demands within interracial reform movements like abolition, woman’s rights, and temperance, and worked to open the pulpit, platform, press, and politics to Black women’s voices.

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.

‘Our Women in Journalism’: African-American Women Journalists and the Circulation of News

2019 ◽  
pp. 528-541
Author(s):  
Caroline Bressey
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Women Journalists ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Press

Caroline Bressey’s essay explores how ‘racial prejudice excluded black women from new spaces of expression created by white women’ in the British press (p. 528). It was not until 1900, with the founding of the Pan-African, that there was a British periodical explicitly dedicated to publishing the contributions of black journalists. Thus, the history of black women’s journalism in Britain prior to the turn of the century is largely unknown. This lack of scholarship makes it necessary to take a ‘transatlantic comparative approach’ when surveying an emerging field of inquiry (p. 528). In the United States, there was more explicit discussion of black women’s contributions to the periodical press, as highlighted in I. Garland Penn’s 1891 book, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. This volume not only highlighted the unequal, sometimes hostile environment in which black journalists worked but also provided a key for discovering the names and achievements of a wide range of women writers, including Victoria Earle and Ida B. Wells. These writers spoke out on key political issues, including racism and sexism, contributing to journals as diverse as Our Women and Children (1888–90) and the more radical Free Speech (1892).

Race, Health Disparities, Incarceration, and Structural Inequality

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Shrage
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Aids Epidemic ◽  
Aids Crisis ◽  
Hiv Aids

The HIV/AIDS infection rate today among African American women is twenty times higher than for non-Hispanic white women. Some recent public health studies suggest that the disparities we see in HIV/AIDS between black women and other groups is linked to disproportionately high rates of incarceration for black men in the United States. The connection between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and mass incarceration needs to be examined. Moral and political issues arise insofar as police profiling and racial bias in sentencing are fueling the HIV/AIDS crisis in African American communities.

The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the “Vital Link”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Higashida
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Old Left ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

This chapter provides a history of Black internationalist feminism. It begins with the intertwinings of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. The chapter then demonstrates how the activism and analysis of African American women on the Old Left such as Maude White Katz and Louise Thompson Patterson laid grounds for postwar Black feminism.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie A. Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Women ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
History Of

This concluding chapter recounts the great strides made by African American women in the United States between the 1910s and the 1970s and discusses their progress in more recent years, such as the breaking down of racialized and gendered barriers to political power. At the same time it returns to Chisholm's story and her wistful assertion that “Someday the country will be ready” for an individual who was both black and a woman to run for the presidency. Moreover, the chapter discusses how the history of black women's political activism between the 1910s and the 1970s offers some complicated lessons for activists in more current times, and suggests that, while improvements have been made over the decades, there are still many issues that need to be addressed today—not just in politics, but in other aspects of black women's lives.

The Bridgwater Family: A History of an African American Family in the American West from Slavery to the Civil Rights Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-380
Author(s):  
Charnan Williams
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
American West ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American Family ◽  
American Family ◽  
The South ◽  
The Family ◽  
History Of

Abstract The Bridg(e)water Family Papers is a substantial archive that details the history of an African American family who left the American South in the late nineteenth century for freedom in the American West. In the early twentieth century, the family eventually arrived in Montana, where they experienced both degrees of freedom and unfortunate forms of racial discrimination. Both the family matriarch and her daughter—Mamie and Octavia Bridgwater, respectively—were the main architects of the family archive. These two Black women constructed a collection that provides insight into the history of the Black West. Utilizing their archive, this article shows how the Bridgwaters departed from the South in search of social and economic advancement through participation in the military, membership in Black organizations, and landownership. Although they were out of the South, the Bridgwaters still encountered racially discriminatory practices that are indicative of the African American experience throughout the United States. The struggle of the Bridgwater family and their descendants to navigate this ambivalent terrain in the West is the consistent theme of their archive.

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