Beyond respectability
Subtitle: the intellectual thought of race women
By: Brittney C. Cooper
Series: Women, gender, and sexuality in American history; Women, gender, and sexuality in American history
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 187
ISBN-13: 9780252040993; 9780252082481; 9780252099540
Subjects: Intellectual life; National Association of Colored Women (U.S.); African American women; Biography; African American intellectuals
Other titles: Intellectual thought of race women
Description: Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-179) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the duty of the true race woman; title: Organized anxiety : the National Association of Colored Women and the creation of the black public sphere; title: "Proper, dignified agitation" : the evolution of Mary Church Terrell; title: Queering Jane Crow : Pauli Murray's quest for an unhyphenated identity; title: The problems and possibilities of the Negro woman intellectual; title: Epilogue.