Women's Work

Women have always been historians. Whether in schoolrooms or kitchens, state houses or church pulpits, women functioned as teachers of history and historical interpreters, offering narrations of the past to criticize existent narratives and inspire new ones. Within African-American communities, women began to write histories in the years after the American Revolution. Distributed through churches, seminaries, public schools, and auxiliary societies, their stories of the past translated ancient Africa, slavery, and ongoing American social reform to populist audiences North and South. In the United States, black women have labored to sustain the cogency of their race and their families through the promotion of education, Christian and historical, for themselves and for their families. This book surveys the creative ways in which African American women harnessed the power of print to share their historical revisions with a broader public. These speeches, textbooks, poems, and polemics did more than just recount the past. They also protested their present status in the United States, using history to write a new story for the future of African America.

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories and Religion and Society in Frontier California.
Kathryn Lofton is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University.

- Introduction
- 1.: Maria Stewart (1832)
- "An Address Delivered Before the African-American Female Intelligence Society of America"
- 2.: Ann Plato (1841)
- "Education"
- "Death of the Christian"
- "Louisa Sebury"
- "The Natives of America"
- 3.: Frances E.W. Harper
- "Liberty for Slaves" (1857)
- "Moses: The Story of the Nile" (1869)
- "Then and Now" (1895)
- 4.: Frank A. Rollin (1883)
- "The Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany"
- 5.: Mary V. Cook (1887)
- "Woman's Place in the Work of the Denomination"
- 6.: Josephine Heard (1890)
- "Welcome to Honorable F. Douglass"
- "Wilberforce"
- "They Are Coming"
- "Resting: In Memoriam of Mrs. Bishop Turner"
- 7.: Anna Julia Cooper (1892)
- "The Status of Woman in America"
- 8.: S. Elizabeth Frazier (1892)
- "Some Afro-American Women of Mark"
- 9.: Virginia Broughton (1894)
- "Woman's Work"
- 10.: Mrs. N.F. Mossell (1894)
- "The Work of the Afro-American Woman"
- 11.: Hardie Martin (1896)
- "How the Church Can Best Help the Condition of the Masses"
- 12.: Victoria Earle Matthews (1897)
- "The Awakening of the Afro-American Woman"
- 13.: A.E. Johnson (1899)
- "Some Parallels of History"
- 14.: Katherine Davis Tillman (1901)
- "Heirs of Slavery. A Little Drama of Today"
- 15.: Pauline Hopkins
- "Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Self" (1902-1903)
- "Educators" (1902)
- 16.: Leila Amos Pendleton (1912)
- "A Narrative of the Negro"
- 17.: Olivia Ward Bush-Banks (1914)
- "Unchained, 1863"
- "A Hero of San Juan Hill"
- 18.: Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1926)
- "Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire"
- 19.: Hallie Quinn Brown (1926)
- "Harriet Tubman"