Doers of the word
Subtitle: African-American women speakers and writers in the North (1830-1880)
By: Carla L. Peterson.
Series: Race and American culture
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 284
Subjects: American prose literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism; American prose literature -- Northeastern States -- History and criticism; American prose literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; American prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism; Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century; African American women social reformers -- Northeastern States; Social problems -- United States -- History -- 19th century; African American women -- Intellectual life -- 19th century; African Americans -- Social conditions -- 19th century; African American women in literature; African Americans in literature; Social problems in literature; Race in literature
Description: Adapting a verse from the Epistle of James - "doers of the word" - nineteenth-century black women activists Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others, travelled throughout the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern regions of the United States. They preached, lectured, and wrote on issues of religious evangelicism, abolition, racial uplift, moral reform, temperance, and women's rights, thereby defining themselves as public intellectuals.

In situating these women within the emerging African-American urban communities of the free North, Doers of the Word provides an important counterweight to the vast scholarship on Southern slavery and argues that black "Civil Rights movements" cannot be seen as a purely modern phenomenon.

In particular, the book examines the ways in which this Northern black population, despite its heterogeneity, came together and established social organizations that would facilitate community empowerment; yet Peterson's analysis also acknowledges, and seeks to explain, the highly complex relationship of black women to these institutions, a relationship that rendered their stance as public intellectuals all the more bold and defiant.

Peterson begins her study in the 1830s, when a substantial body of oratory and writing by black women first emerged, and traces the development of this writing through the shifting political climate up to the end of Reconstruction. She builds her analyses upon Foucault's interdisciplinary model of discourse with an explicitly feminist approach, drawing upon sermons, spiritual autobiographies, travel and slave narratives, journalism, essays, poetry, speeches, and fiction.

From these, Peterson is able to answer several key questions. First, what empowered these women to act, to speak out, and to write? Why, and in what ways, were they marginalized within both the African-American and larger American communities? Where did they act, speak, and write from? How did they negotiate the power relations of sexism and racism in their work? And, lastly, how might one distinguish between their social action and its literary representation?

In seeking to answer these questions, Peterson herself may be seen as a "doer of the word," carrying forward the legacy of these nineteenth-century black women activists.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-271) and index.