Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood - Softcover

Santamarina, Xiomara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807856487 ISBN 13: 9780807856482

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Synopsis

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 Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth Keckley's 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.

About this title

Book Description

"Offers the promising approach of using labor as a means to parse the interlocking identities of race, class, and gender."-- American Historical Review

From the Inside Flap

Santamarina examines four autobiographies by nineteenth-century African American women. Moving beyond the calls for abolition that marked the writings of black elites during this time, these former slaves and free black women wrote about their own overlooked or disparaged work as socially and culturally valuable to the nation, elevating the status of wage labor as a mark of self-reliance and civic virtue.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0807856487
• ISBN 13: 9780807856482
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 240