The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice From the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters, and: The Power of Femininity in the New South: Women's Organizations and Politics in North Carolina, 1880-1930 (review)

Born in North Carolina to a slave mother and white master, Anna Julia Cooper is widely heralded as a foremother of modern black feminism. Her reputation and influence derive largely from A Voice From the South, published in 1892 and included here. But this collection of Cooper’s writings provides a much broader picture of her work and firmly establishes her as a preeminent scholar and social activist. Sociologist Charles Lemert and archivist/curator Esme Bahn have gathered previously unpublished or privately published essays, speeches, personal letters, excerpts from Cooper’s doctoral dissertation, memoirs, and other writings covering more than half a century. This more representative selection of her work answers some of the criticisms of Voice, written when she was in her twenties, and reveals a more mature thinker. The editors have organized the collection to place Cooper’s work within the context of her life and times, spanning over a century (she died in 1964), and to showcase her broad range of concerns—from a refutation of the racist stereotypes in the 1930s radio broadcast Amos ‘n’ Andy, to an early formulation of what is currently known as world systems theory.

The editors also shed new light on a number of important issues. For example, Cooper is not as well known for her social activism as are several of her contemporaries—notably Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell—because her efforts were focused on the local rather than national level. But Cooper’s writings disclose not only a lifelong dedication to racial uplift, but also a less widely recognized commitment to poor African Americans, especially women. Indeed, her sensitivity to “neglected people” may have stemmed in part from her own economic insecurities; for while Cooper projected a life of relative privilege, her economic position was quite precarious. Cooper was hardly a “revolutionary” (a 1942 piece, “Hitler and the Negro,” is overtly anti-Communist and earlier works suggest a Washingtonian anti-immigrant strain); yet she presaged by a century current debates among a wide range of feminist theorists.

Lemert’s introduction is a fine summation of the major secondary literature on Cooper and explores one of the most hotly contested issues regarding her work: the extent to which she uncritically adopted nineteenth-century notions of female domesticity and “true womanhood,” an ideal of white womanhood based on separate male/female spheres. Lemert lines up principally with literary critics Claudia Tate and Hazel Carby and argues convincingly that Cooper was engaged in “strategic transformations of the true womanhood doctrine” in order to critique white female and black male reformers and especially to define the unique position of African American women. However, the editors’ efforts would have been enhanced by drawing on the scholarship of African American women’s historians. For example, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s analysis of black women and the “politics of respectability” is critical to understanding Cooper and the “true womanhood” controversy. Similarly, Lemert shows how Cooper became an unwitting casualty of the Washington/DuBois split that led to her dismissal from the prestigious Avenue M High School in Washington, D.C. amidst allegations of sexual impropriety. But scholars have demonstrated that this division was more complex than it appeared (Washington often privately financed more radical/militant efforts that he publicly eschewed) and that the debate had different meanings for organized black women in particular and for blacks in different sections of the South. More importantly, derisive racial stereotypes concerning black female sexuality made Cooper especially...