eBook

Belabored professions : narratives of African American working womanhood

Santamarina, Xiomara

2005,2006

Overview

According to nineteenth-century racial uplift ideology, African American women served their race best as reformers and activists, or as \"doers of the word.\" In Belabored Professions, Xiomara Santamarina examines the autobiographies of four women who diverged from that ideal and defended the legitimacy of their self-supporting wage labor. Santamarina focuses on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Eliza Potters A Hairdressers Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilsons Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckleys Behind the Scenes. She argues that beyond black reformers' calls for abolitionist work, these former slaves and freeborn black women wrote about their own overlooked or disparaged work as socially and culturally valuable to the nation. They promoted the status of wage labor as a mark of self-reliance and civic virtue when many viewed African American working women as \"drudges.\" As Santamarina demonstrates, these texts offer modern readers new perspectives on the emergence of the vital African American autobiographical tradition, dramatizing the degree to which black working women participated in and shaped American rhetorics of labor, race, and femininity.

• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press,The University of North Carolina Press
• Subject: 19th century / African American authors / African American women / African American women -- Biography -- History and criticism / African American women -- Employment -- History / African American women -- Intellectual life -- 19th century / African American women in literature / African American women in the professions / African American women in the professions -- History / American prose literature / American prose literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism / American prose literature -- African American authors -- History and criticism / American prose literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism / Autobiography / Autobiography -- African American authors / Autobiography -- Women authors / Biography / History / History and criticism / Intellectual life / Narration (Rhetoric) / Narration (Rhetoric) -- History -- 19th century / SOCIAL SCIENCE / United States / Women and literature / Women and literature -- United States -- History -- 19th century / Women authors
• ISBN: 9780807856482, 9780807829813, 0807856487, 0807829811, 9780807877005, 080787700X