HISTORICIZING THE CREATION OF THE HEGEMONY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

Intellectuals of the pre-Civil War era helped to maintain the political hegemony of America's white ruling class through the proliferation of images, both textual and visual, within the public sphere. In this sense, as Gramsci would argue, these “cultural artefacts are deeply imbued with the process of intellectual civilising.”Footnote ¹⁵ They worked to shape the consciousness of ordinary citizens to secure their consent to be governed and to accept the perceived necessity and justness of slavery. As Barbara Novak has argued, landscape artists of the antebellum era such as Thomas Cole and Asher Durand depicted the spectacular beauty of the American landscape in their work, impressing the need to conquer and tame through settlement, farming and property, including slaves, ideally resulting in a “civilization” process of the land and the communities inhabiting it.Footnote ¹⁶ Working within discourses of Manifest Destiny, their work demonstrated scant regard for Native Americans or enslaved black people who were entirely absent from their considerations in the images.

At least four million black people were enslaved in the American South at the start of the Civil War in 1865. These men, women and children had been denied their very personhood, let alone their rights of citizenship, given that they had been legally defined as property, human chattel, since the codification of slavery on North American shores through the latter half of the seventeenth century. As slave status was legally inherited through the mother's line of descent, being born to a free black woman provided a modicum of security to her immediate descendants and subsequent generations.Footnote ¹⁷ Numbers of free blacks increased in the northern states following the American Revolution, with its central ideals of liberty and fraternity seemingly contradicted by the existence of racial slavery on the North American continent. As Wilma King argues, “the Revolutionary War ideology was responsible for the largest increase in the free population when states north of Delaware either ended slavery or made provisions for gradual emancipation.” Indeed, by the start of the Civil War women constituted over 50 percent of the free black population, ensuring their own and their family's well-being through working outside their homes in a variety of mostly service-industry roles, including sewing, laundering clothes and midwifery. Many others went into domestic service, including Maria Stewart, thus competing for employment with immigrant Irish women, particularly in the urban centres of antebellum New York and other major cities.Footnote ¹⁸

Yet the privilege of “freedom” and subsequent entry into the free labour market on the part of black women did not mean that the northern states were absent discourses of antiblack racism and racial discrimination. In order to impress notions of “otherness” in relation to the black populations of the United States, the popular press of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries published derogatory cartoons and illustrations of them, produced as part of a series or published in newspapers such as Harpers Weekly. These emphasized particular facial features, such as the nose or the hair, and further racialized them. Such images worked as an affront to ideals of morality, respectability and propriety – key to white America's aspirations of self, regardless of class. As Patricia Hill Collins has argued, these representations shaped “consciousness via the manipulation of ideas, images, symbols, and ideologies.”Footnote ¹⁹ Thus, when the Senate passed the second Fugitive Slave Act as part of Henry Clay's compromise of 1850, making the North complicit in slavery despite its illegality in most of the northern states, such depictions played a part in maintaining support – albeit tentatively – for such an Act. Similarly, when Chief Justice Taney delivered the majority opinion in the Supreme Court's decision in Scott v. Sandford in 1857, declaring all those of African descent in the United States “noncitizens,” notions of otherness were central to this legal ruling.Footnote ²⁰ While increased sectionalism between the northern and southern states over the issue of state's rights and the expansion of slavery was clearly visible by this point, it bears stating that one of the three branches of government in the United States (lying within the structural domain of power) had legally codified black people as noncitizens and without rights.

While hegemonic discourses of race and racial difference were central in shaping beliefs and attitudes regarding black people in the United States during this era, ideas around gender conventions and models of “appropriate behaviour” regulated by sex and class privileges were also central to shaping the hegemonic order of the day. The Revolutionary period's embodiment of “republican womanhood,” exemplifying white womanly civic virtue in their role as both wife and mother, shifted to an explicit focus on the domestic setting as the emerging industrial order of the early national period saw an increasingly separate function between the workplace and home. Gender ideologies were used to demarcate the spheres of home and work life, with women alone acquiring, at least ideologically, the role of angel of the household. Ministering to the physical, moral and spiritual needs of both husband and children in the carefully crafted spaces of the nineteenth-century home, this was now understood as the civic and moral duty of the wife and mother. This was embodied in the ideal of the “true woman,” who had matured from her republican sister in the Revolutionary era to become the moral guardian of the nation through her duties in the domestic spaces of the antebellum home. As Barbara Welter's groundbreaking essay of 1966 argued, the ideal of true womanhood was “divided into four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman.”Footnote ²¹ This ideal of womanhood was held aloft as the epitome of what women should and could be, regardless of whether class or race or both excluded one from aspiring to this.

While this model of womanhood was raised above all others in the ideological apparatus of the new republic, it also ensured that women had no formal political or legal power. As Linda Kerber points out,

Yet, when Kerber references “women” in the above quote, she is discussing white women of a certain class and race, which entitled them to the privileges of citizenship but not the rights of speaking publicly or privately, so it seemed at least, on political matters. Yet white, educated women like Angelina Grimké, Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton did enter the political arena as much as their “rights” would allow. While unable to vote, they went one step beyond serving as the nation's moral conscience, speaking out on public platforms of temperance, anti-slavery and women's rights. Joelle Million argues that because public speaking was “a political tool reserved for public leaders,” the women who assumed the right to speak on a public platform to try and “influence public thought through public address … challenge[d] a long tradition of masculine exclusivity.”Footnote ²³ Often they were encouraged by others taking the first steps towards a more vocal opposition against the perceived ills of antebellum America. For example, Lucy Stone's decision to take a more activist role on the question of women's rights developed in the mid-1830s following the furore caused by Sarah and Angelina Grimké's anti-slavery speeches in the early 1830s delivered to audiences of both women and men on the public platform of anti-slavery activism. While female reformers might talk in private spaces to other women about the big political issues of the day, Congregational ministers condemned the actions of the Grimke sisters speaking out on a public platform to audiences of mixed race and gender given the God-given order of society, whereby they “assumed the place of man as public reformer,” and supposedly violated her feminine nature.Footnote ²⁴

Rebecca Traister has applauded the work of women like the Grimké sisters and Maria Stewart who “provided a radical new model of women's participation in civic and political life.”Footnote ²⁵ Yet, when Stewart stepped into the public arena in the early 1830s to assume the “male role of public reformer,” she was doubly discredited as both a woman and a black person. As a twenty-six-year-old black woman, widowed in 1829 after just three years of marriage to James W. Stewart, a shipping agent, Maria lived and worked in Boston during the 1830s as part of the city's small free black community of 1,875 out of total population of over 60,000.Footnote ²⁶ The challenges of maintaining her participation in the reform movements of the period were therefore different to those of her white reforming sisters such as the Grimkés and Lucy Stone. Stewart experienced a racially hostile environment not just in the lecture halls of the city where she spoke to multiracial audiences of both men and women, but also on the streets of Boston and in her life experiences more widely. As Marilyn Richardson points out, as a resident of 1830s Boston, Stewart lived and worked in a city where “Blacks lived in segregated housing in a few crowded areas of the city. They were restricted to special sections on public transportation, in lecture halls, and in places of entertainment.”Footnote ²⁷ Employment opportunities were limited, if not legally then through racial discourses that cast black people as intellectually inferior and prone to idleness. Consequently, black women were relegated to the lowest sector of the labour market in the northern free state, listed in Boston's 1826 “City Directory” as “cooks, laundresses and proprietors of boarding houses.”Footnote ²⁸ Many, like Stewart had been, were domestic servants labouring in the homes of privileged white people belonging to the growing urban middle classes of lawyers, merchants and managers. Thus, when Stewart talked of antiblack discrimination in employment practices, resulting in black women living a life of “toil and drudgery,” she was speaking from the realities of her own experiences.

Stewart's intellectual fires were sparked following the death of her husband James W. Stewart in December 1829. Aside from the deep grief Stewart must have experienced at her husband's sudden and untimely death, it also prompted her to consider the discriminatory legal practices that saw her bereft of her deceased husband's substantial property holdings and the income that would have accrued from this. Angry at this injustice and virtually penniless, Stewart must have recalled the words of fellow black Bostonian David Walker's incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1828) with no small degree of incredulity given her current predicament:

It is probable that Stewart and David Walker were acquainted with each other, living and working in Boston at the same time, attending events at the African Meeting House, and frequenting the same social and intellectual circles. Yet despite this, it is Walker, as a black man, who is most renowned for his radical activities, lectures and pamphlets excoriating antiblack racism, the system of slavery and white racial supremacy. Although Stewart was undoubtedly influenced by Walker and his fiery rhetoric grounded in biblical injunctions, her own intellectualism around racial rights and the equality of women within 1830s Boston and beyond is deserving of much more merit and significance. Michelle Wallace's argument that black feminist creativity is a problem in Anglo-American culture is particularly resonant here. Wallace explains that because black women lack power in scholarly disciplines of knowledge production they are subsequently “denied the most visible forms of discursive and intellectual subjectivity.”Footnote ³⁰ While white women and black men already occupy a status of the “Other” in relation to white males, who, “approximating the Law of the Father, make statements of universality,” Wallace contends that black women are therefore positioned relationally as “the Other of the Other in relation to the dominant discourse.”Footnote ³¹ This is clearly evidenced in the public-intellectual cultures of early nineteenth-century America, where black women were defined as the most powerless (the Other of the Other) against the dominant hegemonic discourses of the white ruling patriarchy.

THEORIZING THE CREATION OF THE HEGEMONY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY AMERICA

Gramsci considered the intellectual as a particularly revealing category of work within a society, revealing how the current order or hegemony operates and sustains its power chiefly by manufacturing consent. A number of authors have applied his ideas to understand the continuing dominance of a ruling order in the context of slavery, including Eugene Genovese and Frank Wilderson.Footnote ³³ Gramsci suggested there were two main types of intellectual in society who do such work. First, traditional intellectuals, i.e. those who function as an intellectual for the dominant group but who put themselves forward as “autonomous and independent of the dominant social group.”Footnote ³⁴ They pre-date the current hegemony – so in the nineteenth-century United States this could be the leaders within church movements – and help to secure hegemony (and consent to that hegemony) by acting “as if they present an objective world view that is not connected to the dominant class or most powerful social groups of the time.”Footnote ³⁵ Conversely, Gramsci suggests that “organic” intellectuals are those which are formed as the dominant social group rises to power. These can be scientists or academics or lawyers or teachers, who “all organize ideas and present ways of understanding the world that is adopted by others.”Footnote ³⁶

The strongest example of organic intellectuals in nineteenth-century North America were the founders themselves. As Paul Finkelman reminds us, the ruling elite in the immediate post-Revolutionary period and through the pre-Civil War years condoned racial slavery as an economic good. Indeed, at least twelve Presidents were slaveholders during the pre-Civil War era, including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson.Footnote ³⁷ Numerous public institutions in the United States, including universities, national monuments and even the White House were built by enslaved people. Moreover, as market demand in the North for raw produce grown in the southern slave states increased, the system of racial slavery increasingly extended into the Southwest, and places like Mississippi and Louisiana became key to trading in both sugar and black bodies. Indeed, as Edward E. Baptist has argued in relation to the development of the capitalist systems of the market on the North American mainland, “slavery's expansion shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics of the new nation.”Footnote ³⁸

There are two further features of Gramsci's notion of the intellectual productive for this study. First, while he tends to think about intellectuals in terms of social groups or classes of people, we can, according to Gramsci, also apply it to other categories of identity, such as race, ethnicity or sexuality. As Jones suggests, it was “integral to the development of a politicized black identity, above all in America, that this emergence was theorized and represented by black intellectuals.”Footnote ³⁹ It was through these intellectuals of colour that counterhegemonic movements began to formulate a sense of who they were and who they might want to be in the future to retain a sense of personhood that might otherwise be lost. Second, Gramsci's notion of the intellectual is antielitist at its core – he suggests that “all men [and presumably women are included in this notion of “men”] are ‘philosophers’.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Indeed, he says that “all men [sic] are intellectuals … but not all men [sic] have in society the function of intellectuals.”Footnote ⁴¹ It is the activity, therefore, which denotes an intellectual rather than some kind of special status. As Peter Ives explains, “philosophers and intellectuals do not necessarily possess higher intelligence or profundity or even greater ability to reason per se.” They simply have a different function in which they have a “position within society … [reflecting] the way that you organize and disseminate ideas and the impact they have. One's ideas are never free floating and totally individual but rather they are rooted in one's position within society.”Footnote ⁴²

In this sense, while intellectuals are used to support the hegemony of the current order – the founders producing texts that supported their worldview – Gramsci also helps us to understand how intellectuals from all sorts of backgrounds can potentially contribute to formulate counterhegemonic movements that might challenge the current orthodoxy. As Marcia Landy notes, intellectuals might contribute towards the reinforcement of the current hegemony or, most importantly – for our concerns – they might utilize them as sites of resistance.Footnote ⁴³ That is, individuals might utilize sites or spaces of resistance to encourage different expressions of resistance, including writing, dance, song or perhaps even music. Indeed, Cornel West traces what we might call African American counterhegemonic intellectuals to the Christian tradition of preaching and the black musical tradition of performance.Footnote ⁴⁴ Anthony Bogues, however, critiques West for focussing on “various applications of western categories to black intellectual production rather than excavating the tradition itself.”Footnote ⁴⁵ He criticizes West for ignoring the contribution of black intellectuals and calls for a more historical approach which uncovers the true contribution of black literary intellectuals.

The black female intellectual of nineteenth-century America that we identify here is clearly an example of this kind of resistance, alluded to by Bogues and overlooked by West. The women can be positioned as organic intellectuals emerging as part of a counterhegemonic movement that laid the foundations for two hundred years of resistance that continues today. As Stuart Hall suggests, “it is the job of the organic intellectual to know more than the traditional intellectuals do: really know, not just pretend to know … to know deeply and profoundly.”Footnote ⁴⁶ It is in the following sections that we show how these women did “know, deeply and profoundly,” because they were living and experiencing a struggle within their own working lives every day. We argue that they are elucidating a vision of what Gramsci called a “shared life,” inspiring a possibility that most black women (and most women indeed) could only dream about: equality and dignity in their working and daily lives.Footnote ⁴⁷

Local and participatory activism in the antebellum and Civil War period, then, due to overwhelming constraints, was predominantly an activity carried out by middle-class white women. It was, however, complemented by a handful of black women whose lives were more overtly shaped by a momentum of oppositional politics in the nineteenth century, striving to achieve dignity for black women (and all black people in the United States) in all aspects of their working lives. Acts such as public speaking, writing, performing and art could all be counted among the ways in which black women contributed to shaping the counterhegemonic discourse that Maria Stewart had already begun in the 1830s through her highly politicized writings. What follows is a consideration of the ways in which some black female intellectuals of the pre-1870s presented a collective oppositional politics – or counterhegemonic thought – to contest ideologies of the political elite that represented the black race – especially black women – as morally, culturally and intellectually inferior. These women are positioned as early, foundational examples of resistance driven by black female intellectuals in nineteenth-century North America that led to later widespread collective resistance and the fight for inclusive citizenship. Three major examples of resistance are employed, including regaining control of the black female body, reclaiming heritage and reconstructing citizenship, and education and role models for change. These tactics of resistance within the counterhegemonic struggle sought to wrestle back power and gain dignity and respect for black people, particularly black women, in their own working lives.

“SHE IS NOT COLORED, SHE IS PAINTED”: REGAINING CONTROL OF THE BLACK FEMALE BODY

As Janell Hobson has recently argued, “the visual representation of Black womanhood holds cultural power when rendered as a serious aesthetic subject for beauty, desirability, and bodily autonomy.”Footnote ⁴⁸ While Hobson talks of the literal representation of black female bodies in art, she also asks us to consider the histories of the ways in which black women have contested hegemonic representations of themselves as individuals and as a collective. Many of the women discussed in this paper presented a performance of black womanhood in 1850s and 1860s America that either was counter to that of the accepted stereotypes or else succeeded in subtly questioning racialized gendered representations of the era. Through the dissonant performances of the black female body, these women began to develop a collective oppositional argument to the dominance of elite white ruling men, aiming to challenge the ignominies of the ideologically shaped hegemonies of nineteenth-century American culture. We might here consider Brittney C. Cooper's argument that black women intellectuals of the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth employed “embodied discourse … a form of Black female textual activism wherein race women assertively demand the inclusion of their bodies … by placing them in the texts they write and speak.”Footnote ⁴⁹ While Cooper focusses her argument on women after 1896, it is significant that black female intellectuals of the earlier period were employing such strategies much earlier than has hereto been recognized, “seeing the Black female body as a form of possibility.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Thus we can see how such discourses took embryonic form across the United States among black female intellectuals as a means to champion the black woman's body and mind.

Frances E. W. Harper was an abolitionist, campaigner against antiblack racism and women's right's activist from the early 1850s. Part of the black intellectual movement of the nineteenth century, Harper was perhaps the most prolific black female writer of the period. In addition to her pieces written for black newspapers, poems, short stories and novels, including Minnie's Sacrifice (1869) and Iola Leroy (1892), Harper also entered the lecture circuit, touring the northern and western states of the US before the abolition of slavery in 1865, and then embarking on nationwide tours during Reconstruction and beyond. Speaking and writing on the platforms of abolition, women's rights and black equality, Harper engaged in what Barbara Harlow defines as a “literature of resistance [which] sees itself … as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production.”Footnote ⁵¹ In a Gramscian sense, Harper was struggling as part of a counterhegemony to challenge and redefine what had become a “commonsense” understanding of how African American women were expected to live their lives during this period. Whilst subjugation and resignation had become naturalized and accepted by many, “common sense is not something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself.”Footnote ⁵² Intellectuals such as Francis Harper were therefore central to challenging the dominant hegemony of the period and creating new opportunities for resistance against what was expected of black women of the time.

Harper's lectures during the 1850s and 1860s, performed in front of interracial audiences, were received with a mixed response. Several among her white audiences demonstrated a tone of incredulity that the woman on the platform was black (“she must be painted”); similarly, they could not quite believe such intelligence and articulacy could be possessed by a woman. Indeed, she wrote to a friend during her lecture tour in the mid-antebellum era with a hint of amusement at the audiences’ reactions to her regarding her sex, “you would laugh if you were to hear some of the remarks which my lectures call forth: ‘She is a man,’ again.”Footnote ⁵³ Yet other aspects of her lectures received high praise, especially for their articulacy and eloquence. Speaking before an audience in Randolph County, Indiana, in June 1859, for example, news of Harper's impending talk had prompted much interest: “The courthouse was filled to overflowing, and the largest house that could be obtained in Farmland was too small to hold the large number that flocked to hear her.” For, as the correspondent for the Randolph County Journal continued, “She is one of the best female speakers we ever listened to and her lectures are well received.”Footnote ⁵⁴ A newspaper report drawn from the war years in mid-1864 reiterated this praise for Harper, remarking that her “Lecture on the Mission of the War” “was so replete with logical reasoning and rhetorical diction, that those who heard her said it was the most masterly production they have ever listened to on the subject.” Indeed, when she repeated the same lecture a few nights later, the local newspaper remarked that “seldom have we heard a more cogent, forcible, and eloquent lecture, especially by a woman.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Harper thus confounded expectations of black womanhood in the early nineteenth century by proving herself eloquent, articulate and intelligent. Positioning herself as an exception to the model modesty and reservedness that the ruling hegemony had employed, Harper used this “exception” to demonstrate her “exceptional” capacity to have herself heard and listened to attentively and with noted praise by white audiences. White abolitionist and women's rights campaigner Grace Greenwood had attended a lecture that Harper gave in Philadelphia as part of a series, undoubtedly some time before the abolition of slavery. Greenwood's account is worth quoting at length given the apparent power, not only in Harper's words, but also in her “performance” on the podium:

Greenwood's report of Harper's bodily performance conforms to ideals of nineteenth-century feminine sentimentialization, with her dignified “pleading” and delicate frame and gait.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is accounts such as Greenwood's that have led Carla Peterson to consider Harper as occupying a “quiet” body in the white American imaginary in relation to the black woman in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁸

Her professed “quietness” in terms of bodily performance would have been read as nonthreatening by white America and thus non-powerful and not capable of meaningful resistance. Yet the very composed and reserved “quietness” of her composure contrasted with the powerful “loudness” of her voice, proving herself able, as she was, to throw it out over a crowd of six hundred, despite a full lecture tour that saw Harper lecture nightly over the one-week course of her first lecture tour in 1854. As she noted, “Never, perhaps, was a speaker, old or young, favored with a more attentive audience … My voice is not wanting in strength, as I am aware of, to reach pretty well over the house.”Footnote ⁵⁹ From her lecturing debut to biracial audiences in New England, she went on to counter first impressions of her “quiet body” through the Civil War and Reconstruction via her lectures and more private meetings with formerly enslaved people throughout the South, especially freed women whom she encouraged to have self-respect and dignity in their working lives in the post-emancipation age:

While compassionate towards others of her race, Harper was not averse to pointing out to white Americans their crimes against her people and a reminder of their common humanity. In her speech delivered at the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention in New York in May 1866, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” to an audience of mainly white women, Harper directly criticized the histories of brutality and pain that the black race had suffered at the hands of white America and its impact on the white as well as black populations of the United States:

The content and performance of Harper's speeches belied her “quiet” black body. Countering white male hegemonic arguments about black people, women in general, and black women in particular, Harper challenged models of feminine passivity and intellectual inferiority through her wonderfully direct and articulate addresses to biracial audiences across the nation.

“FLASHING UP AND STARTLING THE PUBLIC”: THE BLACK FEMALE BODY AND ITS PERFORMATIVE POTENTIAL

Another black female intellectual of the era, Sojourner Truth, was never cast in the “quiet-body” role as Harper was. Yet Truth used her body in various ways and through various means, to represent images of black women as possessing their own representation of self, agency and dignity in their working lives. Unlike Harper, who was born a free woman in Baltimore, Maryland, Truth was born into slavery in New York State in the early 1800s. Escaping from slavery in 1826 with her young daughter, Sophia, a year before the state had officially abolished the institution, Truth was a lifelong illiterate and used her remarkable abilities of extemporization to address biracial conventions in the 1850s through the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, famed author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), conducted an interview with Truth in an 1863 edition of the Atlantic Monthly. Stowe participated in racialized discourses of benevolent racism, much like Grace Greenwood's account of Harper, although in very different ways. As Truth entered the room, Stowe recounted that “a tall, spare form arose to meet me. She was evidently a full-blooded African, and though now aged and worn with many hardships, still gave the impression of a physical development which in early youth must have been as fine a specimen of the torrid zone.”Footnote ⁶² Well grounded in the racialist tones of white abolition, Stowe continued with a description of Truth containing racial signifiers that confirmed to her mostly white readers that Truth was the “exoticized other”:

Stowe's description evokes images of voodooism and conjuration – religious beliefs and magical practices rooted in Africa. Truth's self-possession … silent and subtle power … tall form were all used by Stowe to define Truth as almost otherworldly, or at the very least not suited to a model of womanhood that nineteenth-century white America would understand.

However, it was through depictions such as these that Truth articulated a presence of self on the lecture circuit from the 1850s through to her death in November 1883. What white contemporaries of Truth, such as Stowe, neglected to consider were the ways in which black female intellectuals of the era and since have created an oppositional politics countering racialized hegemonic discourses through laying claims to power, particularly over self-representation and bodily performance.Footnote ⁶⁴

Strategies of shaping counterhegemonic narratives for black female intellectuals, especially on the lecture circuit, differed depending on their specific performance styles. Like Harper, uncertainty over Truth's gender on the part of her white audiences was familiar. Yet while Harper's audience demonstrated uncertainty about her sex, her already noted performance of “quiet articulacy” on the lecture podium, coupled with her slight frame, allowed her to enact a noted model of womanhood which helped to dispel such questions. Not so for Sojourner Truth. As Harriet Beecher Stowe's account makes clear, Truth's self-assurance in front of a white audience combined with her unmistakable presence occasioned by her stature gave rise to charges that she must be a man, masquerading as a woman. While Harper relied on her so-called quiet performance, however, Truth literally used her body as evidence not only of her gender identity but also of the ways in which that female body had been abused and exploited by white America.

Holding a series of anti-slavery meetings in Indiana in September 1858, Truth's audience at one of these gatherings included several pro-slavery Democrats. As the meeting came to a close and people began to leave, one of the audience members, a Dr. T. W. Strain, requested that “the large congregation ‘hold on’ and stated that a doubt existed in the minds of many persons present respecting the sex of the speaker, and that it was his impression that a majority of them believed the speaker to be a man.” This conclusion had been reached on account of her voice, which many had surmised was too deep to be that of a woman. Strain insisted that, in order to prove her sex, Truth “submit her breast for the inspection of some of the ladies present, that the doubt might be removed by their testimony.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Truth's agency at this moment was pivotal as she refused the “delicacy” of discreetly providing proof of her female-ness to a small number of women. Instead, she demanded that she proved her credibility as a black woman to the whole congregation, for as she reminded them, “it was not her shame that she uncovered her breast before them, but to their shame.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Truth's act of disrobing in front of an all-white audience not only was courageous and dignified but also presented a form of truth telling in relation to the bodily exploitation that African American women endured, free or enslaved. Her white audience attempted to shame her black body through an act completely at odds with the ideals of (white) feminine decorum and respectability. Yet it was her audience's shame that Truth capitalized on, not only through the demand that a woman bare her breasts but also reminding them of the importance of the black female breast in the (re)productive labour of the nation:

Through “[f]lashing up and startling the public,” Truth's actions here can be read in what Lauren Berlant terms a “diva act of citizenship.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Berlant argues that such acts suspend the dominant narrative, allowing for subaltern political activism through a reinterpretation of the accepted version of history. In the process, as Berlant also points out,

Through the act of baring her breast to this white audience Truth deftly reinforced the brutal and violent histories of enslavement on the North American continent. She was therefore enacting a diva act of citizenship, encapsulating the oppositional politics she had lived throughout her activist life.

Both Truth and Harper employed their bodies in both concrete and more abstract ways, as a challenge to their white audience through words – whether written or spoken – to reject the ideological hegemonies of power in early nineteenth-century America. Through this means they aimed to help dismantle the powers of a male white elitist state which sanctioned antiblack racism and had denied the full privileges of citizenship – rights of education, dignity and ambition – in the United States to all black people since its formation. Yet while several black female intellectuals like Truth and Harper were fighting for recognition of citizenship rights within the United States, others were also keen to invoke a collective history of a shared African past and look to a future beyond the racial brutalities black people were facing in the United States.

“OH YE DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA, AWAKE!” RECLAIMING HERITAGE AND RECONSTRUCTING CITIZENSHIP

The belief that African people – including those in the diaspora – shared the common history and destiny of pan-Africanism has been a central component of black intellectual thought in the United States for over two hundred years.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such ideas in the nineteenth century have historically been closely associated with black male thinkers such as Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois. However, black female intellectuals of the early nineteenth century also employed such arguments in order to counter hegemonic discourses concerning the absence of black histories and nationhood among black people in the United States. Indeed, in Gramscian terms, and as Paul Polgar notes, this was a central component of the development of a new “historic bloc” in which a counterhegemony inclusive of a newly constructed kind of inclusive and multiracial American citizenship could spring forth and be built.Footnote ⁷¹

Maria W. Stewart employed the histories of the continent of Africa in her speeches as a means to invoke a sense of pride in her audience and instil in them a sense of collective history that they might emulate and carry forward in their working lives. In her “Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall” in Boston, on 27 February 1833, Stewart reminded her audience of the intellectual significance of the African continent in the ancient world:

Drawing on both the Old and New Testaments, Stewart's speeches called on those of African descent to account for their lack of resistance to oppression, the “highest form of obedience to God,” in Stewart's view.Footnote ⁷³ Reproving her audience for the current “thick mist of moral gloom [hanging] over millions of our race,” Stewart demanded that they begin speaking up for themselves as political activists to demand the rights and privileges of citizenship, such as access to dignity and fair treatment at work: “when will your voices be heard in our legislative halls … contending for equal rights and liberty.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Counterhegemonic discourses are evident in Stewart's re-remembering of the triumphs of African knowledge and progress to counter the exclusions of these significant contributions to global histories. Yet they are also perhaps more clearly marked in her descriptions of the unruly and harmful forces wielded by state power in early nineteenth-century America and the eventual triumph over such iniquity.

Employing biblical references again to ground her analysis in moral rectitude, Stewart compared America to the biblical city of Babylon, synonymous with sin, immorality and shameful pride, “for she has boasted in her heart ‘I sit a queen and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.’ (Revelations, 18:7)!”Footnote ⁷⁵ Embodying America, or the patriarchal federated states, as the whore of Babylon, Stewart decried “her” for being

To counter the abominations of Babylonia's (read: white America's) past, Stewart held up a prophetic promise to her audiences that “powerful sons and daughters of Africa shall shortly arise, who will put down vice and immorality among us, and declare by him that sitteth upon the throne that they will have their rights.” Stewart heralded violent retaliation, echoing fellow black abolitionist David Walker, if white America refused such liberties to the black race, citing God's wrath at the “oppression of injured Africa,” if this request be denied.Footnote ⁷⁷

While black female intellectuals like Maria Stewart engaged in nascent discourses of pan-Africanism, others advocated a more transnational approach, urging African Americans to emigrate in order to finally realize the capacity for dignified labour in their working and familial lives. Mary Ann Shadd Cary was probably the earliest black female proponent of this in the 1850s, promoting a scheme of emigration to Canada and once there the formation of a racially integrated society. As Carol B. Conaway argues, there were a number of nationalist perspectives in black intellectual thought in the nineteenth century, ranging from Frederick Douglass's nativist integration to Martin Delany's nationalist separatist philosophy. Shadd Cary's stance was somewhere in between these two very different models of the formation of a collective black nationhood.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Cary family had migrated to Canada in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, causing alarm among members of free black communities across the United States lest they should be mistaken for a fugitive and sold into slavery. Once there, Shadd Cary cofounded the weekly newspaper Provincial Freeman, along with Rev. Samuel Ringgold Ward, its first issue published on 24 March 1853. As Conaway has noted, as the first black female editor of a newspaper, Shadd Cary “entered the almost exclusive male profession of antebellum journalism and exhibited boldness that was uncharacteristic of most women at the time.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Such boldness was typical of Shadd Cary throughout her activist career, and she was relentless, as Peterson points out, in her insistence “on her right to participate in the masculine public spheres of debate.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Shadd Cary published her Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect: with Suggestions respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver's Island for the Information of Colored Emigrants in 1852. Its central premise was that “the passage of the odious fugitive slave law has made residence in the United States … dangerous in the extreme,” making settlement in British Canada (present-day Ontario), the northern neighbour of the United States, a realistic alternative.Footnote ⁸¹ Furthermore, Shadd Cary argued that there was little potential for a revision of political and cultural thinking in the US when,

Her counterhegemonic stance is evident here in her critique of the current structures of ruling power in the United States, with the political governance of the country evidently supported through cultural and social means.

Shadd Cary's Plea compared the dangers of remaining in the United States with the opportunities presented to black emigrants to British Canada, including its climate, opportunities for labour and interracial education:

Shadd Cary took every opportunity to encourage this model of emigration, believing it the only way to see her race survive and thrive. She evidenced her “boldness” even when her audience were hostile to her intentions of speaking in public as a black woman. Despite consternation at her presence there, her contribution to the National Convention of Colored People in Philadelphia in the fall of 1855 was met with praise by the correspondent writing for Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Reflecting on her speech, which was initially given ten minutes but then extended because of the interest it provoked, the correspondent admitted,

Shadd Cary used her editorship of the Provincial Freeman from March 1853 through August 1857 to represent the successes of the 40,000 black emigrants, fugitives and freedmen already settled in Canada. Her newspaper sought to encourage others to make the same choice through relating success stories of black emigrants being transformed into model citizens given the right opportunities under a supposedly non-racist system of governance.

“WE ARE [ALL] BORN WITH FACULTIES AND POWER, CAPABLE OF ALMOST ANYTHING”: EDUCATION AND ROLE MODELS FOR RACIAL UPLIFT

Shadd Cary argued that access to equal education was integral to the development of the model black citizen in Canada's West in terms of racial uplift and black women's fight to achieve dignity in their labour. Indeed, one correspondent to the Provincial Freeman in 1854 reminded black émigrés, “We must educate ourselves and educate our children. Let the young men (and the young women too) form Literary and Debating Societies, and let those who have no talent for public speaking, let them learn and practice writing.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Similarly to other black female intellectuals of the era, Shadd Cary had spent much of her working life educating others as a teacher, in the antebellum United States and Canada, and through Reconstruction. She encouraged freedpeople to educate themselves as a mean of self-liberation. At the age of sixty, she graduated from the Howard University Law School, as only the second black women in the United States to earn her law degree.Footnote ⁸⁶

Another black female intellectual who championed the notion of liberation through education was the free colored teacher Julia C. Collins. Living and working as a teacher in a school in Williamsport, Pennsylvania during the early 1860s, Collins penned several pieces for the black newspaper Christian Recorder, advancing the importance of education for black people, especially so in the wake of pending Union victory in the Civil War and the promise of rights of citizenship including formal schooling. Collins took care to remind her readers in her April 1864 essay “Mental Improvement,” “We are [all] born with faculties and power, capable of almost anything.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Comparing white and black children at birth she countered the idea that the white race were innately superior in terms of intellect, arguing that they were both “[d]estitute alike of knowledge, the children of the white race have, in this respect, no advantage over the black; both have everything to learn.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Her “Intelligent Women” piece, published in June 1864, encouraged black women in particular, as part of their responsibility to the future of the race, to “improve every opportunity that is offered for our moral and intellectual culture … not merely as a matter of taste … it is incumbent upon us, as a duty.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Edmonia G. Highgate, the daughter of formerly enslaved parents, was a schoolteacher who also wrote for the Christian Recorder during the closing years of the war and into the early years of Reconstruction. Evidencing activism at the local level in addition to her intellectualist perspective, Highgate wrote to the American Missionary Association in January 1864, making an application to travel to the South to teach, pointing out that as a teacher “she could labor advantageously in the field for my newly freed brethren.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Her experiences teaching in The south from 1864 through 1870 were particularly challenging, not least because of the rudimentary environments she taught in, the basic need for teaching equipment, and the conditions of poverty and hardship that the formerly enslaved remained in despite their newly won freedoms.Footnote ⁹¹ Yet Highgate's letters throughout her years of teaching document the realities of her appointment in the Reconstruction South, which was often dangerous and violent:

Despite the threats of danger to her life and that of her students, Highgate persisted in the role of educating the formerly enslaved, acknowledging the vital role that teachers played in allowing black people to realize their ambitions and achieve success. In her unique and articulate style, she urged black men and women in a Christian Recorder piece in July 1866:

Highgate encouraged black men and women to provide role models for future generations to model and aspire to, claiming that active citizenry now would lead to uplift for the future race: “The race needs living, working demonstrations – the world does. Young man [and woman], the master in world-reconstruction has called; is calling, but will not enact, for you and your sister.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Such strong words from black female intellectuals such as Highgate and other women featured in this paper present a call to black people in the early nineteenth century through Reconstruction. This was a demand for self-realization, of reclaiming dignity and respect in their chosen professions in life – whether that be from the humble washerwoman or the unskilled labourer to the lawyer or teacher.