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View allA Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South
Cooper
1892
The founding text of Black feminist thought.
A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South
Anna Julia Cooper · 1892
In 1892 — eleven years before The Souls of Black Folk — Anna Julia Cooper claimed the one standpoint America had never consulted: "when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me." Decades before anyone said "Black feminism," she argued what the term now names: that the woman question and the race question are one case, and that a suffrage movement reserved for white ladies and a race movement led by men both leave the Black woman — and therefore the whole race — outside the door. She is the hinge of this catalog: the writer who universalizes Wollstonecraft and Mill and anticipates Du Bois.
11 chapters · 59,955 words · ~4.5 hr read
Contents
Our Raison d'Être
Cooper's preface: in the nation's long case over the race question, one witness has never been heard — the Black woman of the South.
Part First — Soprano Obligato
The indispensable solo voice: womanhood and the race's regeneration, women's higher education, white suffragism's blind spot, and woman's standing in America.
Part Second — Tutti ad Libitum
All voices, freely: the race problem reframed as the engine of progress, the Negro in white America's literature, the race's balance sheet, and the gain from a belief.