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

In the epilogue to Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century, Nazera Sadiq Wright calls attention to the continual defamation of black girls in the public sphere, describing instances of cruelty toward first daughters Sasha and Malia Obama, Olympic gold medalist Gabby Douglas, and actresses Quvenzhané Wallis and Amandla Stenberg, among others. The persistent neglect of black girlhood motivates Wright’s important and incisive study, spurring this first critical investigation into representations of girlhood by African American authors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wright explores a variety of materials, including conduct manuals, novels, short stories, advice columns, and newspaper pieces. The study excavates conversations within the black community about the cultural significance of black girlhood, recentering attention on the productive formations of writers and editors who through girlhood could conceptualize futurity, negotiate fears, and question the logics of American social relations.

For Legacy readers, most important might be Wright’s nuanced attention to the role of gender to representations of girlhood’s potential. She argues that “black men tended to write the black girl as an ideal figure, or, more precisely, as their ideal figure,” whereas “black women writers tended to focus on the interiority of the girls. They wrote about their inner thoughts, their plans, their dreams and aspirations” (3). In Wright’s mobilization of P. Gabrielle Foreman’s method of reading “aright” (8), the study offers a different lens on both familiar and recovered texts, one that attends to the presence of girl readers, the valence of age within texts, and the role of gender in authorship. Wright discusses the strategic deployment of innocence as a mode of resistance both to constructions of female licentiousness and to the real threat of sexual predation by whites. She reads age distinctions within texts as signals of politicized innocence and focuses attention on the representations of girls who reflect on their positions within households and society at large.

The study moves across the nineteenth century, identifying particular depictions of girlhood that dovetail with each moment’s urgent political and social questions. Wright begins with the 1820s and 1830s, studying black male editors’ idealized domestic texts in Freedom’s Journal (1827– 29) and Colored American (1837– 41). She uncovers how black girlhood defined and confirmed black male adults’ success as protectors. Especially interesting is Wright’s juxtaposition of these editors’ perspectives against an unsigned text published in an 1827 edition of Freedom’s Journal, “Theresa—A Haytien Tale,” in which a girl warns Touissant L’Ouverture of an attack by the French. Wright focuses on the intersection of gender and youth in the depiction of Theresa and argues in the chapter’s conclusion that the author “was most likely a woman because of her attention to the interiority and decision-making process of her heroine” (59). Wright also discusses the construction of a “prematurely knowing” girl in the context of temperance literature that acknowledges children’s knowledge of adult weakness and failures (12). Wright notes the striking absence of black mothers in this period of republican motherhood, a gap that speaks of the work of black women outside the domestic space. In her chapter on the 1850s and 1860s, Wright attends to frequently studied texts such as Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) alongside an understudied text by Maria Stewart, “The First Stage of Life” (1861), and abolitionist texts that use black girls to spotlight white benevolence. Wright’s analysis of Stewart enables us to recognize the impossibility of insularity for black children, and the readings of Wilson and Jacobs emphasize the complex interior lives of black girls faced with suffering. This chapter urges critics to consider youth, alongside race and gender, as a frame that defines the subjectivity of characters and enables their resistance to suffering.

Texts in the 1870s and 1880s emphasize the potential of education for girls...