Imaobong Umoren and Sinead McEneaney are chair and secretary (respectively) of the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW), a scholarly association dedicated to the historical investigation of women and gender in North America, South America and the Caribbean, either within or between nation-states and/or the northern or southern hemispheres. Founded by Professor Jay Kleinberg in 2008, the society was originally called British Historians of Women in the Americas (BHWAs) but was renamed in 2011 to reflect a more international membership. SHAW provides an arena for researchers from across a range of disciplines to come together, offering a focal point in which their hemispheric gender concerns can coalesce and develop further.
Sinead McEneaney: Some years ago, I reviewed Women and Social Movements, International for the History Workshop Journal Online. This was the second iteration of the extensive subscription-only database project initiated by Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin, and published by Alexander Street Press. The initial project sought to chart the history of women in American social movements since the 1600s, including the suffrage, peace, labour and student movements, through the sourcing, digitizing and publication of primary documents alongside a range of scholarly articles to provide perspective. Currently, the collection as a whole comprises 123 document projects, and over 170,000 original documents. The latest part of the project sets out to specifically examine the experiences and contributions of African American women within a range of movements. The result is a comprehensive resource which traces the writings of black women activists, explores the importance of black women in the long suffrage movement, and highlights the position of women in the various stages of civil rights activism and social-justice agitation.
Imaobong Umoren: The pioneering work of Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, especially in her 1998 book African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, has been instrumental in unearthing early black women suffragists and exploring the ways in which they shaped the suffrage movement. This collection builds and expands on this work, with Terborg-Penn acting as consultant. In total, it covers 130 years of black women suffragists from the 1830s to the 1960s. Thus far, the collection includes 106 black women suffragists ranging from well-known figures like Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell to lesser-known women like Naomi Talbert Anderson. Overall, the collection has amassed 1,450 documents.
McEneaney: Thankfully the list that Terborg-Penn provided almost forty years ago has been supplemented by more recent scholarship on black women's reform movements, although perhaps not as much as one might have expected. Race was certainly a divisive issue in the American suffrage movement, but this collection underscores the extent to which African American women were crucial in mobilizing support and shifting the discourse within the wider movement. Nonetheless, with some notable exceptions, their voices have been marginalized in dominant narratives of suffrage. As Terborg-Penn notes in her own explanatory essay, the historical erasure of black women, especially in nineteenth-century records and before, forces scholars into painstaking research where race, and gender, can often be determined only through systematic identification of familiar names and likely family and kin relationships. The depth and breadth of this collection – comprising the writings of well-known activists like Ida B. Wells and Nannie Helen Burroughs, as well as those of lesser-known women – is all the more impressive once we consider the work required to unearth these records.
Umoren: The strength of the collection lies in its comprehensive array of primary sources, published and unpublished writings and speeches made by and about black women. The collection draws heavily on the correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, much of it online. As a keen supporter and powerful advocate of black women's engagement with suffrage activism, Du Bois shared close links to many figures whose writings he helped publish and whose voices he helped to amplify through the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
The collection unites sources available at a wide range of archives: Bethune-Cookman University; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library; the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University; the Sophia Smith Collection; the Robert Woodruff Library; Fisk University; the Atlanta University Center; the Boston Public Library; the University of Michigan Research Library; the Beinecke Library at Yale University, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections; the Clarke Historical Library, the Schlesinger Library, the Houghton Library at Harvard University; Cornell University Library, Clements Library, Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society; the Library of Congress; and Oberlin College. For the first time, these materials are brought together in a way that is valuable for researchers and undergraduates alike.
McEneaney: While the editors do not claim that the collection is definitive, they have attempted to make it as exhaustive as possible: in their editorial note to the project, Dublin and Sklar explain that early decisions to catalogue only a representative sample of writings of black women suffrage activists were set aside as they extended the scope of the project. Even then, not everything could be included, and the database will be best used alongside online (and archival) collections of newspapers like the Chicago Defender, Crisis and the Pittsburgh Courier, all of which published letters and columns by key African American women active in abolitionist, suffrage, reform and social-justice organizations.
Umoren: The collection is well organized and easy to navigate. The black women suffragists are listed in alphabetical order. Upon clicking on their names, the user is directed to a series of links, arranged in quite an intuitive way: “Links to Biographical Sketches,” “Related Writings in Database,” and a division between “works by” and “works about,” “Related works in Du Bois Online Correspondence,” and in some cases “Scholarly Essay.” The narrative behind the collection is held together through these short commissioned essays written by leading scholars of African American women's history. So far, there are fifteen scholarly essays on notable women; there is scope for extension of this interpretive part of the project.
The succinct essays provide biographical detail about the women, including links to primary sources, and assess the impact of the women not just in terms of their involvement in suffrage but also in other areas of their activism. For instance, in the essay about Mary McLeod Bethune, Audrey Thomas McCluskey discusses her leadership within education, her work with black women's organizations like the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) and the National Council of Negro Women, and her US-based and international influence on sociopolitical issues. In an essay on Addie Waits Hunton, Adrienne Lash Jones illuminates more of Hunton's internationalism and broad commitment to social justice. The wide remit of the essays furthers our understanding of the women and the inclusion of endnotes provides the reader with further references to explore the women in more depth.
McEneaney: The material in this project is remarkably well linked to the wider database. While the most interesting material remains the writings of the African American women themselves, careful hyperlinking brings us also to writings about black women. For example, we can consider the writings of key suffrage activists alongside documents revealing structural racism within the National Woman's Party. Sklar and Jill Dias's curation of documents under the question “How Did the National Woman's Party Address the Issue of the Enfranchisement of Black Women, 1919–1924?” provides a valuable context for understanding the barriers faced by women like Hallie Quinn Brown, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells (all of whom feature in this more recent collection within the database).
Fascinating also is the extension of the corpus linguistics analysis devised by Michelle Moravec, who scraped an enormous amount of data out of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage (1848–1861) for the original database, and then compared the language of the white authors (Cady Stanton, Anthony, Gage) with a corpus analysis of the language employed by the black authors of documents in the Black Women Suffragists collection. The results are intriguing. Moravec's analysis indicates that African American women favoured what she calls “embodied discourse”: the soul and the body figure large in the language of black women activists, consistent with what we know about the links between political activism and bodily autonomy and strength expressed by women like Sojourner Truth and Wells, in the face of corporeal horror through slavery, lynching, assault. Moravec acknowledges that as the database is extended over time, there will be ever further exciting possibilities for corpus analysis to ask questions about the connections between embodied discourse, race, and religious language. Traditionally historians have seen digitization as an access route to sources, but Moravec's relatively small-scale corpus analysis should awaken us to the real possibilities of asking new questions as larger datasets become more readily available through digital projects of these kinds.
Umoren: Most readers will continue to see the real value of this project in the ways that it excavates known and unknown stories of African American women and their challenges to the state and the status quo. Taking a closer look at some of the individual women detailed in the collection, it is clear how comprehensive it is. A good example of this is Anna Julia Cooper: the collection includes essays and speeches from A Voice from the South (1892), her only published work, as well as her correspondence with her alma mater Oberlin College, articles she published in Oberlin Alumni Magazine in the 1930s, her address to the American Negro Academy, and her writings with Charlotte Forten Grimke, to list a few. When it comes to understudied women, the collection does well to include letters and articles written by women in black and sometimes white mainstream newspapers. Creative fiction, like poetry, is also featured in the collection. The inclusion of fictional and nonfictional works reflects how black women suffragists shared their ideas in multiple genres.
McEneaney: The wealth of the personal stories is remarkable. Access to such a wide range of contemporary texts will enrich (and make easier) countless research projects at all levels, from undergraduate to postdoctoral. The Narrative of the Life and Travels of Nancy Prince takes us from the borders of the US, to Jamaica, Russia, beyond and back. Alongside the narrative of her namesake Mary Prince, this story of slavery, separation, and abolitionism also works as a travelogue, and reminds us that the women in this collection were not only political reformers but travel writers and fiction writers, and poetry writers. The writing of little-known women like the NAACP activist Daisy E. Lampkin reinforces the importance of faith in the identity of many women. The prolific writings – poetry and plays – of Georgia Douglas Johnson challenge the oft-accepted dominance of men in the cultural landscape of the Harlem Renaissance. The breadth of the material here ensures that we cannot easily engage in historical reductionism.
Umoren: That the collection also includes works written about the women signals links between the women and the wide range of networks they were part of, among, for instance, the NACW, the Young Women's Christian Temperance Union, the Women's Christian Temperance Union, political parties and religious groups, as well as pan-African and the New Negro organizations. This demonstrates the breadth of the women's activism that was not just centred on suffrage but widened out to include broader struggles against colonialism, sexism, and racism. Including works written regarding the women provides further information on their impact as activists and intellectuals. Another strength of the collection is that it spans such a broad chronological period, highlighting how 1920 was in many ways not the end, but rather marked a turning point in black women's attempts to receive the vote across the US.
Due to the rich nature of these primary sources, the Black Woman Suffragists collection will help to shed new light not only on African American women's activism but also on their ideas. Over the past ten years, there has been renewed interest in black women's intellectual history. Recent work by scholars Mia Bay, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara D. Savage and Britney Cooper, to name a few, has stressed the significance of, and called for more attention to be paid to, black women's thought. By including the voices of a variety of black women suffragists this collection can help to reveal the heterogeneity of black women's ideas. This collection will be invaluable to current and future students and scholars of black American women's history and literature. With the centenary of the US suffrage a few years away, this collection stands as testament to recognizing and including African American women as being as central to the suffrage struggle as their white counterparts.
