Anna Julia Cooper and "A Voice from the South": Black Feminist Thought in 1892

Anna Julia Cooper, from A Voice from the South (1892)

Long before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the word intersectionality in 1989, and before the Combahee River Collective issued its 1977 statement, there was Dr. Anna Julia Haywood Cooper. Born into slavery in 1859, she became a distinguished author, activist, educator and scholar, and her life redrew the limits society placed on Black women. Her legacy endures, yet she is still not a household name.

The book

In 1892, Cooper published her most important work, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. It opens:

I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of Blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.

Cooper likens the nation to a courtroom in which the most important witness — the Black woman — has been left mute. Her argument:

• Black women stood where "a woman question and a race problem" met, and so went unknown or unacknowledged in both.
• That same position gave them a unique vantage on society.
• Educated Black women were therefore the key to uplifting the race — and well placed to shape their communities, the nation and the world.

The book has two parts: The Colored Women's Office, on Black women until then without a voice, and Race and Culture, on race and culture more broadly.

Why it matters

Three essays

"Woman Versus the Indian." Black women fought for human rights but were largely ignored by leaders of the women's suffrage movement, and Cooper openly confronted the movement for letting white women's racism go unchecked. Here she answers a suffrage leader's essay of the same name, which had set white women's rights against the rights of Indigenous peoples, with a call for the rights of all people — above all those usually denied them. It contains the line now printed in the U.S. passport:

The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.

The very next sentence turns it on the Women's Movement, which Cooper says embodies that cause — "if its pioneers could only realize it."

"The Higher Education of Women." Against 19th-century opposition to educating women, Cooper makes the case for higher education. Black men, she argues, understood racial uplift but fell back on "16th century logic" when it came to Black women — and to Black girls:

[G]ive the girls a chance!... Let our girls feel that we expect more from them than that they merely look pretty and appear well in society.

"The Status of Woman in America." Cooper looks at the U.S. economy and women's conditions, stresses the commitment of Black women — educated or not — to their community's advancement, and argues for Black women's agency beyond the home.

Her home

Cooper's former home at 201 T Street NW in Washington, D.C., contributes to the LeDroit Park Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. The house is privately owned.

Sources

Based on Mia L. Carey, "Dr. Anna Julia Cooper (1859-1964) and 'A Voice from the South,'" part of the series Exploring the Meaning of Black Womanhood: Hidden Figures in NPS Places, National Park Service, quoting Cooper's A Voice from the South (1892); a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The article twice calls the book "A Vision from the South"; its title is A Voice from the South.