In Defense of Anna Julia Cooper

This is a VERY raw piece I wrote for a class this semester.

Mothering Feminism: Dominant Womanhood in Anna Julia Cooper

Slavery produced a division between ideals of womanhood for white women and black women. The white woman was esteemed a lady: pure, pious, submissive and domestic. The African-American woman, on the other hand, was a worker, chattel, a non-woman. She was the antithesis of everything ladylike. During the nineteenth century, there was a shifting discourse on the role of women, at the very least white women, in the United States. There was a call for equal rights between men and woman: the right to vote, the right to education and the right to work outside the home. While the former two were unknown to all women, the latter was a “right” all too familiar to African-American women. This call for equality could extend only so far as the women with white skin when it came to working outside of the home. Some African-American women had different ideas of the rights of women.

In Anna Julia Cooper’s essay, “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race,” her argument calls for the occupation of the position of lady by black women. While some may argue that Cooper is simply submitting to the dominant patriarchal paradigm of womanhood that called for a woman to be mother and wife first and foremost, her assertion is rather forward thinking for a race of woman that had never been afforded that right before. Her call for the recognition of black women as woman and lady is revolutionary in and of itself. I want to look briefly at the ways in which Cooper’s essay calls for a radical womanhood by challenging the ideals of womanhood that didn’t extend past white women at the time. Although it may seem that she is simply conforming to an oppressive definition of womanhood, she is in fact, challenging what it meant to be a black woman in the United States.

Up until this point in history the African American woman had been slave, chattel, worker, birthing machine, and whipping post. She had no right to her children, no right to marry and no right to her own home, only to the preservation of her master’s home. While white women were coveted as mother figures, wives and home keepers, black women were denied these very privileges through a dehumanization of their self. When slavery was finally abolished, African American women were faced with the challenge of deciding what defined a black woman. Cooper’s definition is hugely feminist if you consider the conditions that women of her race had previously endured in the shackles of slavery. Cooper was calling for a radical equality for black women to the highest of all white women: the right to be a lady. In her essay, “The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W.E.B. Du Bois and Anna Julia Cooper,” Hanna Wallinger states, “Cooper firmly subscribes to the Victorian view of woman as the morally superior being” (272). It is no surprise that Cooper looked to this ideal of womanhood when defining what a black woman should aspire to. White woman of the era, arguing for women’s rights were doing the exact same thing when they looked to the ideal of manhood as the model to strive for in their struggle for equality with men.

Cooper believes firmly in the right of women to raise their children. Throughout the antebellum era, slave women were robbed of their children in an attempt to break them as well as to relieve them of any hope. Her belief that the definition of mother is intrinsically intertwined with the meaning of woman, is critical to an understanding of her feminism. In her essay, Cooper states:

Woman, Mother, —your responsibility is one that might make angles tremble and fear to take hold! To trifle with it, to ignore or misuse it, is to treat lightly the most sacred and solemn trust ever confided by God to human kind. The training of children is a task on which an infinity of weal or woe depends.(641)

This argument attacks the institution of slavery in that it denied African American women their right to womanhood through a denial of their motherhood, in the refusal of the right to raise their own children. While this may seem to some scholars to prescribe to an oppressive discourse on womanhood, in reality, it directly attacks the brutal practice of denying slave women their children.

Modern feminist scholarship likes to criticize Cooper for the irony in failing to recognize her ideas of equality as nearly as oppressive as the slave conditions she previously lived under. Elizabeth West argues that “while Cooper’s assertions of sexual equality signify her resistance to the male dominated rhetoric of the late-nineteenth-century America, her repeated acquiescence to a discourse that ties womanhood to domesticity ironically ties her more firmly to the patriarchal ideals that she attempts to overturn” (84-5). While West does recognize Cooper as fighting for women’s equality, she fails to recognize her as radical when arguing for a right that had thus far been denied to African American women in the United States. West can not see past the white middle class definition of womanhood as oppressive only to those women it had previously been accorded. She fails to recognize the assumptions made by Cooper along race and class lines that afford these rights to women regardless of “rank, wealth, or culture” (Cooper 638).

Although in modern discourse we may look at Cooper’s argument for black women’s rights as falling under the same patriarchal notions of womanhood that white women sought to free themselves, this argument is fundamentally flawed in that it fails to recognize the division between the previous definitions of woman that fell along the color line. One must consider the radical notion that Cooper asserted when she called for the right to be a woman, a lady, in a time when a black woman was considered neither. Her assertion is equally as radical as white women’s call for equality with men. Some may argue that “her male audience is not disturbed by her affirmation of woman’s central role in nation building, because while woman may be hoisted onto an ideological pedestal, she is there unempowered” (West 83). And it may be true that her call for this type of womanhood wasn’t disturbing to men in the era, but it wasn’t a direct challenge to manhood that Cooper was emphasizing. Her call for an ideal of womanhood that enveloped all women was far more challenging to the position of white women. Her race and class politics were at the forefront of her argument. It is for this that she is truly radical.

WORKS CITED

Cooper, Anna Julia. “Womanhood a Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton and Company, 2004. 636-650.

Wallinger, Hanna. “The Five Million Women of My Race: Negotiations of Gender in W.E.B. Dubois and Anna Julia Cooper.” Soft Canons: American Women Writers and Masculine Tradition. Ed. Karen L. Kilcup. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,1999.262-280.

West, Elizabeth. “Cooper and Crummel: Dialogics of Race and Womanhood.” Rhetorical Women: Roles and Representations. Eds. Hildy Miller and Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005. 81-102.