Jones, Martha S.
All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900
UNC Press (Chapel Hill)
2007
OUR SYNOPSIS: Martha S. Jones examines Black women’s activism, leadership, and public presence in the United States from the 1830s to the 1890s. She centers “the extent to which African American women would exercise autonomy and authority within their community’s public culture.” (4) The women in this book are active, trailblazing cultural leaders devoted to justice and equality. The antebellum portions of the book focus on free states and the postbellum portions are national.
BIG QUESTIONS:
What “public culture[s]” do you consider yourself a part of? How do you engage with them?
How did class impact Black women’s role in the freedom struggle?
Jones argues that antislavery setbacks in the 1850s led to a retreat from women’s rights in Black freedom movements. What can we learn from this unequal distribution of adversity?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“All Bound Up Together examines the woman question debate among African Americans as a series of contests that were bound up, to borrow Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s phrase, with economic and legal transformations; challenges of geographic migrations; institution building, including churches, political organizations, and print culture; and resistance to a range of denigrating images. These were formidable endeavors, and in everyday life women were indispensable partners as black people took them up.” (22)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “Woman’s Political Future,” in The World’s Congress of Representative Women, ed. May Wright Sewall (Chicago: Rand, McNally & Company, 1894), 433-437, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x001139931.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
