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

From 1886–87, Gertrude Bustill Mossell wrote an advice column in the New York Freeman (1884–87), an influential black newspaper with wide distribution. Mossell asserts that, if properly trained, girls can fend for themselves in any situation. “Just tell him in plain English to keep his ‘hands off’” (qtd. in Wright 109), she writes, further advising mothers to “instill in their [daughters’] very nature that they are safer in their own hands than they are in the hands of any man—preachers not excepted.” Nazera Sadiq Wright highlights Mossell’s advice as “a quietly radical bombshell that had many layers of meaning for the girl who read her words right” (110).

As this example demonstrates, Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century provides detailed examinations of recovered texts, offering nuanced close readings that are also thoroughly grounded in relevant scholarship. The book recovers attention to black girlhood during a century when the notion that young black women had access to girlhood was contested by systemic racism. Offering practical advice to aid black girls’ growth into self-sufficient and confident women, Mossell’s voice empowers. Wright’s archival research recovers representations of black girlhood, including, in many cases, the previously neglected voices of nineteenth-century black women writers. Wright’s book breaks new ground in the fields of United States women writers, United States children’s literature, African American literature, and nineteenth-century black print cultures. Building on scholarship from Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830–1900 (1998) to Paula T. Connolly’s Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790–2010 (2013), the book explores new avenues for research on race and children’s literature while provocatively extending key concepts raised in Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011) by offering a more concentrated look at the specifics of black girlhood in the long nineteenth-century United States.

Wright begins by examining representations of black girlhood in Freedom’s Journal (1827–29), the first black newspaper in the United States. Like most newspapers in the 1820s, Freedom’s Journal was replete with reprints from contemporaneous print media, and Wright acknowledges how the practice of reprinting complicates assumptions about communities of readers. She also wrestles with the difficulty of determining authorship when articles are published anonymously or with pseudonyms. She finds firmer ground, however, when locating the contributions of black men and their “attempts to protect the character of black girls” through didactic stories teaching girls conventional behaviors culminating in marriage (35–36). Wright extends her analysis to stories from the Colored American (1837–1841), in which black girls are often “two-dimensional” and “idealized” figures (a criticism that could apply to a wide variety of characters in American children’s literature of the era) (58). Yet Wright enriches her analysis of antebellum black newspapers with a stunning reading of The Life and Adventures of Olaudah Equiano (1829), an abridged children’s version of the 1789 original. Quaker abolitionist and educator Abigail Mott Moore published the abridgment for the students of the Mulberry Street African Free School in New York City, but the publisher appended a reprinted account of the horrors of the Middle Passage originally aimed at shocking white adults into abolitionism. Wright argues that the appended text subverted Mott’s intentions and forced young black readers away from childhood into premature knowledge.

The phrase “prematurely knowing” (44) is quoted from Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and the quote becomes a focal point of the following chapter about antebellum black girlhood in an era that denied access to girlhood innocence for blacks. Wright examines representations of black girlhood in white abolitionist and Christian publications. Predictably, these girls are “flat and two-dimensional” (70). But in Maria W. Stewart’s little-known story “The First Stage of Life” (1861), Wright recovers the tale of a black girl coming...