Doers of the word : African-American women speakers and writers in the North (1830-1880)

Peterson, Carla L. 1944- (Author).

Summary: Adapting a verse from the Epistle of James - "doers of the word" - nineteenth-century black women activists Sojourner Truth, Jarena Lee, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, among others, travelled throughout the Northeastern, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern regions of the United States. They preached, lectured, and wrote on issues of religious evangelicism, abolition, racial uplift, moral reform, temperance, and women's rights, thereby defining themselves as public intellectuals. In situating these women within the emerging African-American urban communities of the free North, Doers of the Word provides an important counterweight to the vast scholarship on Southern slavery and argues that black "Civil Rights movements" cannot be seen as a purely modern phenomenon.

Item details

ISBN: 0195085191 (alk. paper)
ISBN: 9780195085198 (alk. paper)
Physical Description: print
ix, 284 p. : ill ; 25 cm.
Publisher: New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Contents / Notes

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-271) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

"Doers of the word": theorizing African-American women speakers and writers in the antebellum North -- "A sign unto this nation": sojourner truth, history, orature, and modernity -- "Humble instruments in the hands of God": Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, and the economy of spiritual narrative -- "Coloured tourists": Nancy Prince, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, ethnographic writing, and the question of home -- Whatever concerns them, as a race, concerns me": the oratorical careers of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sarah Parker Remond -- "Forced to some experiment": novelization in the writings of Harriet A. Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper -- Seeking the "Writable": Charlotte Forten and the problem of narration -- Home/Nation/Institutions: African-American women and the work of Reconstruction (1863-1880).