Words of Fire by Beverly Guy-Sheftall Page A

Sex, 1831-1900,” is intended to address: “Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator, the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black
woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for its survival?” (Washington, Invented Lives, xvii-xviii).
    We must look back to the nineteenth century for answers to these questions. Reading Maria Stewart and Anna Julia Cooper, among others, tells us that black women themselves were aware of their own erasure from the annals of history. This is why they found it necessary to chronicle the achievements of their sister-activist-thinkers.
    In order to reconstruct our black feminist intellectual tradition in the present, we must reinterpret familiar histories. The black women’s club movement which blossomed in the 1890s as a project of racial uplift, according to traditional scholarship, was also the first feminist movement among African Americans. The struggles of club women to debunk stereotypes about their sexuality, to define black womanhood differently, and to work for their own empowerment are certainly the beginnings of a black women’s liberation movement. As importantly, we must revisit the anti-lynching campaign of Ida Wells-Barnett, as historian Paula Giddings has done, and realize its importance as a precursor of the modern Civil Rights movement and the movement to liberate black women from a patriarchal, racist social order. The discourse on sexuality that Wells-Barnett generated in her brilliant analyses of the sexual politics of lynching makes her a race woman, to be sure, but she is much more, besides.
    The feminist discourse here has been impacted by other discourses, particularly the Victorian “cult of true womanhood,” which dictated that women embrace values such as piety, chastity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Women who embraced these values might be labeled “cultural feminists” because they did not reject altogether the gender prescriptions of their times. Though they espoused greater independence for women, they also insisted that enlightened wifehood and motherhood were appropriate aspirations.
    What is clear is their understanding about the difficulties facing them because of their race and gender. Anna Julia Cooper admonished her brothers for their lack of enlightenment on the woman question and their internalization of conventional gender notions. “... [I]t strikes me as true that while our men seem thoroughly abreast of the times on almost every other subject, when they strike the woman question they drop back into sixteenth-century logic” ( A Voice from the South, 75). She also urged married women to seek employment outside the home and develop their intellects, but hastened to add that marriage was not the only route to selfactualization.
    I continue to wonder whether the black community would have distanced itself as much from women’s liberation struggles in the 1970s if we had read the wise words—words afire—of our sister-ancestors, only a small group of whom appear in this chapter.

Maria Miller Stewart (1803-1879)
    M aria Stewart, a free black from Hartford, Connecticut, may have been the first African American woman to speak in public about women’s rights, particularly the plight of “daughters of Africa,” whom she urged to develop their intellects, become teachers, combine family and work outside the home, oppose subservience to men, and participate fully in all aspects of community building. She also issued an unusual call for black women to build schools for themselves. In 1833, after a short career on the lecture circuit, she delivered a farewell speech to the black community, particularly ministers, in which she expressed resentment about its negative responses to her defiance of gender conventions as a public lecturer. This passionate defense of women’s right to speak