Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century by Nazera Sadiq Wright (review)

The African American Policy Forum report by Kimberlé Crenshaw, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected (New York City: Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University, 2015) and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality Report by Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls' Childhood (Washington, DC: Center on Poverty and Inequality at Georgetown Law, 2017), find that black girls are viewed as less innocent and more likely to be punished than white girls their age: "Black girls may be subject to harsher disciplinary interventions because they are perceived to be unruly, loud, and unmanageable" (Black Girls Matter, 24). The concerns of black girls in the twenty-first century may appear to be unconnected to a book about black girlhood more than a century earlier, but Nazera Sadiq Wright's Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century attends to the stereotypes of "loud" and misbehaving black girls as well as their prim and diligent counterparts. Her book begins from the question, "Where do these [black] girlhood tropes originate?" (1).

Trained as a literary scholar, Wright does not attempt a social or cultural history that details the lives of black children; instead her book is a literary "genealogy of black girlhood" that begins with "the earliest appearance of black girls in black publications in the late 1820s" and ends with the New Negro period of the early twentieth century (18). This approach successfully lays the groundwork for understanding twenty-first-century representations of the "loud girl" (161–63). Wright analyzes early black newspapers, slave narratives, novels, advice columns, and published advice manuals. In her chapters on black newspapers, Wright explores black girls' place in the early black public sphere—taking note of how newspapers "cultivated black children as sophisticated readers" by promoting the idea that newspapers should be written for and shared with the entire black middle-class family (55).

Assessing the "age" of childhood—who counts as a girl or as a young woman—is a constant challenge for historians of childhood. Wright's most important contribution to the history of childhood is her differentiation between "youthful girls" and "prematurely knowing girls" in antebellum society. In chapter 2, drawing on a phrase from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Wright explains that black writers took pains to distinguish between these two phases of girlhood. Jacobs wrote: "Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. … She will become prematurely knowing in evil things" (12). Brilliantly extending out from Harriet Jacobs, Wright theorizes that, between a girl's youthful girlhood and prematurely knowing girlhood, there "occurred a shift in her consciousness" (61). "Youthful girls" were often six years old (but less than twelve) and sexually innocent. Youthful girls were not weighed down with the full realization of racial discrimination and were full of potential. Meanwhile, a black girl becomes "prematurely knowing" once she had to "contend with serious issues of survival and safety at an age when most middle-class white girls were being protected and carefully prepared for a successful marriage" (61).

Wright's use of Harriet Jacobs as a theorist of black girlhood here proves illuminating; Jacobs uses the phrase to signal an end to sexual innocence and the beginning of serial sexual abuse. I believe Wright could have successfully used this framing as a thread throughout the book, particularly in chapters 3 through 5. Moving forward, scholars on black girlhood must take Nazera Wright's youthful / prematurely knowing analytic seriously as they consider black girls' life stages in their work. In the 2017 Georgetown study Girlhood Interrupted, authors found that "beginning as early as 5 years of age, Black girls were more likely...