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Chapter 4 “In the Lives of These Women are Seen Signs of Progress”: Hopkins’s Race Woman and the Gospel of Success In August 1899, a controversy erupted during the second biennial National Association of Colored Women (NACW) convention in Chicago when Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin challenged Mary Church Terrell’s election to a second term as NACW president. Ruffin and fellow delegates from the Boston-based Woman’s Era Club made allegations of disorganization and ballot tampering. After the convention, once Ruffin’s attempt to be elected as the NACW’s second president failed, the Woman’s Era Club appointed an ad hoc committee to draft resolutions of censure against the association. The Woman’s Era Club, which considered itself the authoritative “mother club of the NACW,” disapproved of “the conduct of all the business sessions of that convention, [and] the high-handed, unparliamentary rulings of the presiding officer [Terrell], and the unconstitutional elections.”1 Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, who at this time was an up and coming novelist and journalist, was a member of the Woman’s Era Club and served as the ad hoc committee’s secretary. Considering the nature of this position, it is safe to assume Hopkins was responsible for drafting the resolutions, which were unanimously adopted by the club, including the recommendation that the Woman’s Era Club “withdraw all affiliation with the National Association until such a time as that organization is presided over by constitutionally elected officers.”2 Although the resolutions were approved by the club members , at Ruffin’s request they were “laid upon the table for a more careful consideration, and consultation with other clubs in the Federation.”3 The ad hoc committee assented on the condition that their censures be printed in The National Notes (the NACW’s newsletter) and the New York Age, a newspaper edited by T. Thomas Fortune.4 74 “In the Lives of These Women Are Seen Signs of Progress” Hopkins’s participation in what has been called “Mrs. Ruffin’s Attacks” illuminates the political interactions that took place between Hopkins and prominent club women.5 While Hopkins’s own activity with the black woman’s club movement has already been noted by Hazel Carby, Hanna Wallinger, Lois Brown, and others, little attention has been given to the direct influence club women, namely Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, have had on Hopkins’s literary endeavors. Humanitarian, women’s rights advocate, founder of the Woman’s Era, a national newspaper for African American women, and founder of the Woman’s Era Club, Ruffin was a member of Boston ’s African American upper class and the widow of George Lewis Ruffin, the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School and one of the first appointed black judges in the nation. Rodger Streitmatter characterizes Ruffin as a resourceful woman who was “financially secure and had a national reputation for her organizational ability and philanthropic endeavors .”6 Mrs. Willis’s character in Hopkins’s first novel, Contending Forces, is a powerful club woman, “the brilliant widow of a bright Negro politician,” and just one literary manifestation of Hopkins’s interactions with Ruffin (143). Published in 1900, Contending Forces was actually completed in 1899, the same year as the contested NACW elections. Mrs. Willis multitasks, overseeing young women in Ma Smith’s sewing circle and using a blackboard to review recent events pertinent to the black community. Afterward, Mrs. Willis leads a formal discussion on “The place which the virtuous woman occupies in upbuilding a race” (148). Unfortunately, Mrs. Willis’s characterization has been routinely underrated, notwithstanding Siobhan Somerville’s assertion that her conversation with Sappho “has an important function in the narrative , as it piques the reader’s appetite for the divulgence of Sappho’s secret while deferring its exposure.”7 Mrs. Willis is present in only one chapter, and the Contending Forces narrator makes ambiguous statements about her motives , but a close reading reveals Hopkins does not share her narrator’s sentiments . Albeit a secondary character, Mrs. Willis plays a positive and pivotal role in Contending Forces, serving as a black woman’s success archetype that, prior to 1900, had been absent from American literature. A number of literary critics mistakenly assume Hopkins’s portrayal of Mrs. Willis is intended to diminish the influence of ambitious black women. Richard Yarborough provides a primary example of this assumption in his introduction to the Oxford edition of Contending Forces. Here he argues that Hopkins’s feelings toward Mrs. Willis are...

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