Black Female Intellectuals in Nineteenth Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen?

213 Pages·2022·4.83 MB·English

by  Rebecca J. Fraser

BLACK FEMALE INTELLECTUALS
IN NINETEENTH CENTURY
AMERICA
Drawing on letters, personal testimony, works of art, novels, and historic Black
newspapers, this book is an interdisciplinary exploration of Black women’s
contributions to the intellectual life of nineteenth-century America.
Black Female Intellectuals in Nineteenth Century America reconceptualizes the idea
of what the term “intellectual” means through its discussions of both familiar
and often forgotten Black women, including Edmonia Lewis, Harriet Powers,
Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, among others. This re-envisioning
brings those who have previously been excluded from the scholarship of Black
intellectualism more generally, and Black female intellectuals specifically, into the
center of the debate. Importantly, it also situates the histories of Black women
participating in the intellectual cultures of the United States much earlier than
most previous scholarship.
This book will be of interest to both undergraduate and postgraduate specialists
and students in the fields of African American history, women’s and gender
history, and American studies, as well as general readers interested in historical
and biographical works.
Dr. Rebecca J. Fraser is an associate professor of American History and Culture
at the University of East Anglia, UK. Her previous books have included Courtship
and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (2007) and Gender, Race and Family
in Nineteenth-Century America: From Northern Woman to Plantation Mistress (2012).

BLACK FEMALE
INTELLECTUALS IN
NINETEENTH CENTURY
AMERICA
Born to Bloom Unseen?
Rebecca J. Fraser
Designed cover image: La negresse aux peonines Painting by
Frederic Bazille (1841–1870) 1870 Dim. 0,6 × 0,75 m Montpellier,
musee Fabre – The black woman with peonies. Painting by Frederic
Bazille (1841–1870), 1870.0.6 × 0.75 m. Fabre Museum, Montpellier,
France Photo © Photo Josse/Bridgeman Images
First published 2023
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Rebecca J. Fraser
The right of Rebecca J. Fraser to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other
means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fraser, Rebecca J, 1978– author.
Title: Black female intellectuals in nineteenth century America: born
to bloom unseen?/Rebecca J Fraser.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022038449 (print) | LCCN 2022038450 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781032220444 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032210094 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781003270973 (ebook)
Classification: LCC E185.89.I56 F737 2022 (print) | LCC E185.89.I56
(ebook) | DDC 305.48/8960730922 – dc23/eng/20220816
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038449
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038450
ISBN: 978-1-032-22044-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-21009-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-27097-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003270973
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For all the brilliant women with untapped genius who, unlike
Emily Dickinson, could not stay home alone to collect their
thoughts – to work undisturbed.
For Maya, as always.

CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
List of Images and Artwork xii
Introduction: Searching for Black Female Intellectuals in
Nineteenth-Century America 1
1 “Citizenship Divas” of Nineteenth-Century America:
Black Female Intellectuals and the Complexities
of Performance 19
2 “I Must Speak, I Must Think, I Must Act.” [Laura
Simmes, 1864]: The Christian Recorder, Literary Activism,
and the Black Female Intellectual 53
3 “The Darling Offspring of Her Brain” [Harriet Powers,
c. 1892]: Creativity, Quiet Activism, and Nineteenth-
Century Black Female Artists as Intellectuals 79
4 “Oh Yea, Daughters of Africa, Awake! Awake! Arise”
[Maria W. Stewart, 1831]: Nineteenth-Century Black
Nationalism and Questions of Gender, Race, and Home 115
5 “Labor[ing] Advantageously in the Field” [Edmonia
G. Highgate, 1864]: Black Female Educators and the
Philosophy of Racial Uplift 148
viii Contents
Conclusion: The Realities of Life (and Death) for
Nineteenth-Century Black Female Intellectuals 167
Bibliography 184
Index 197
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Pondering my third project as I signed off on the second in 2012, I began to
panic. The first book project was always going to be the PhD (albeit a heavily
revised version of it); the second was always going to be something I’d put on the
backburner during the PhD research; but for the third, well I had nothing. And
like the third album, this had to be the one that stepped forward and confirmed
something about me being an academic who was capable of intellectual growth.
It had to be something completely new, but I was, to be honest, stumped. Being
a historian of nineteenth-century America and living and working in the UK
meant lengthy research trips away from home. I had become a first-time mum in
2008 and missing my baby daughter’s first experience of crawling made me long
for a research project which didn’t equate to missing these moments in real time.
With all this in mind, I turned to reading the scholarship around trauma,
reviewing this literature to gain an insight into the posttraumatic stress that for-
merly enslaved people must have suffered following their emancipation; their sto-
ries of postwar suffering, both emotional and physical, were dark, and I was deeply
affected. But they are not my stories. I realize there are others closer to these stories
and better placed to write about this topic. Years of reading and researching the
traumas of enslaved family separations; brutal punishments meted out by slavehold-
ers, mistresses, and overseers for slight infractions; and the rape and sexual abuse of
enslaved women gave me an awareness not only of the horror but also of the coura-
geous and the creative responses to these soul-murdering acts.
As I read and reflected, I wondered if I might use the concept of trauma and
place it within an interpretive model asking how Black women articulated the
cultural traumas of slavery in post-emancipation America. Black women proved
pivotal in communicating the human dimensions of experience and emotion
through several forms including the visual, the literary, and the oral. The project