When people hear the words “feminism” or “feminist movement,” far too often they visualize only the struggles of white women. For those who study feminism as a series of waves, there has been a strong push to make inroads on the erasure of black women and other women of color from earlier segments of feminist history. As a black feminist for over 50 years, I have always pushed back against our exclusion from the historical academic canon, and have practiced and written about what we now define as “intersectional” feminism—in particular, the deadly double impact of race and gender on my sisters.
Many are informed about and aware of pioneers like Audre Lorde, who stated that “black feminism is not white feminism in blackface.” Terms like “intersectionality” or “identity politics” are now common in our political discourse, but far too often people—including politicians—know little to nothing of the deeper historical roots that made these later concepts possible.
Over the last month, I’ve examined the lives and contributions of black women who have lifted us as we’ve climbed: We stand on the shoulders of women like Maria Louise Baldwin, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary Church Terrell. Today, it is fitting that I close the month with Anna Julia Cooper, who in her 105 years of life never gave up the fight for her sisters, and who many scholars have named “the mother of black feminism.”
“Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.”’ ~ Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South
This black woman speaks not only for herself, or for other women like herself. Cooper stood for all of us as an example of the possible. Who could imagine that a woman born into enslavement in Raleigh, North Carolina would, in her lifetime, receive a doctorate from the Sorbonne? Who could imagine that she would be the only woman quoted on 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 and the very birthright of humanity.” ~Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South
Cooper’s beginnings were those of far too many of her black brothers and sisters: She and her mother, Hannah Stanley Haywood, were owned by Wake County landowner George Washington Haywood. The Haywoods were a prominent family in North Carolina, and it is not clear whether George or his brother, Dr. Fabius J. Haywood, Sr., was Anna Julia’s father.
“As her mother refused to discuss the matter, Anna's paternity was never fully determined, but she believed her father to have been her mother's owner, Dr. Fabius J. Haywood, Sr., or his brother George.”
When considering just how young women managed to move from a family history of rape and enslavement to the world of higher education, it is imperative to remember the sacrifice of their mothers. My own formerly enslaved great-grandmother, who could neither read nor write, ensured that all of her children, the boys and the girls, would not only learn their letters, but would go on to college.
Cooper’s mother did the same.
After the Civil War, Stanley worked as a domestic servant in Raleigh to support her daughter’s education. Cooper later wrote about her mother’s sacrifice saying that “many an unbuttered crust was eaten in silent content that she might eke out enough from her poverty to send her young folks off to school.” Cooper’s two older brothers were both independent by that time, but Stanley was always on hand to help them and their families, as well.
Though I have mentioned her Sorbonne doctorate as an extraordinary achievement in Cooper’s life, were she here, she would demur.
Cooper wrote that while some may choose to remember her for her doctorate as her most exemplary achievement, she would prefer to be remembered for creating, in 1930, the Hannah Stanley Opportunity School, “dedicated in the name of my slave Mother to the education of colored working people”. Cooper implies that her mother’s relations with Haywood were forced, not consensual. Thus, right from infancy, as Cooper recalls, her worldview was shaped by an awareness of the mutually reinforcing politics of race and gender oppression, both from her family and from other, older slaves around her.
Cooper spoke of her “father” only once.
Presumably my father was her master, if so I owe him not a sou & she was always too modest & shamefaced ever to mention him”. Later, in founding the Hannah Stanley Opportunity School at Frelinghuysen, Cooper would drop “Haywood” from her mother’s name entirely, as she had in her own name (although biographical sources occasionally refer to her as “Anna Julia Haywood Cooper,” Cooper did not use the Haywood name). Although Cooper never again publicly discussed her mother’s “shame” or her own rejection of the Haywood “lineage,” her silence on the matter is not meaningless: to the contrary, it speaks volumes.
The background and early history cited above can be found in Vivian May’s 2007 seminal work, Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction.
Vivian M. May explores the theoretical and political contributions of Anna Julia Cooper, a renowned Black feminist scholar, educator and activist whose ideas deserve far more attention than they have received. Drawing on Africana and feminist theory, May places Cooper's theorizing in its historical contexts and offers new ways to interpret the evolution of Cooper's visionary politics, subversive methodology, and defiant philosophical outlook. Rejecting notions that Cooper was an elitist duped by dominant ideologies, May contends that Cooper's ambiguity, code-switching, and irony should be understood as strategies of a radical methodology of dissent.
May shows how across six decades of work, Cooper traced history's silences and delineated the workings of power and inequality in an array of contexts, from science to literature, economics to popular culture, religion to the law, education to social work, and from the political to the personal. May emphasizes that Cooper eschewed all forms of mastery and called for critical consciousness and collective action on the part of marginalized people at home and abroad. She concludes that in using a border-crossing, intersectional approach, Cooper successfully argues for theorizing from experience, develops inclusive methods of liberation, and crafts a vision of a fundamentally egalitarian social imaginary.
What’s extraordinary about this presentation of Cooper’s work is that it took so many decades to even begin to give Cooper her due. Black female scholarship and critical thinking were shoved into the closet—not only by white America, but by the black male intelligentsia as well. Had Cooper simply been an organizer, or a crusader, or a doer of good works, we’d more than likely know more about her.
We do know that she was engaged in the controversies between and among the black male intellectuals of the time: W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Charles Chesnutt. This is described in feminist historian Frances Richardson Keller’s “In An Educational Controversy: Anna Julia Cooper’s Vision of Resolution,” published in the National Women's Studies Association Journal.
Out of deep educational disagreements that tore black communities asunder in the nineteenth century, an African American woman offered solutions. Anna Julia Cooper pioneered one of the most significant innovations ever introduced in any society. She envisioned and brought into being a system we know as community college. She championed and modeled the idea that higher education is a lifelong experience, that it can be available for everyone, and that everyone can work as she or he learns. Distressed by the “old, subjective, stagnant, indolent and wretched life” of far too many women, Anna Cooper demonstrated that women, as well as men, can escape ignorance and poverty. In her community she discovered, built, and nurtured a working-adult college; she believed that students need no longer feel thwarted in their life possibilities, that they could learn as they worked. As Booker Washington spoke for industrial education, W.E.B. Du Bois for elite opportunity, and Charles Chesnutt for the vote to achieve both, Anna Cooper offered higher education, vocational education, and lifelong education—and women’s inclusion in them all—as the road to equal opportunity.
Thanks to Documenting the American South (DocSouth), Cooper’s classic text, A Voice from the South, by a Black Woman of the South, is now available online.
Cooper opens the book with “OUR RAISON D’ÊTRE.”
IN the clash and clatter of our American Conflict, it has been said that the South remains Silent. Like the Sphinx she inspires vociferous disputation, but herself takes little part in the noisy controversy. One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman,
An infant crying in the night,
An infant crying for the light;
And with no language—but a cry.
The colored man's inheritance and apportionment is still the sombre crux, the perplexing cul de sac of the nation,—the dumb skeleton in the closet provoking ceaseless harangues, indeed, but little understood and seldom consulted. Attorneys for the plaintiff and attorneys for the defendant, with bungling gaucherie have analyzed and dissected, theorized and synthesized with sublime ignorance or pathetic misapprehension of counsel from the black client. One important witness has not yet been heard from. The summing up of the evidence deposed, and the charge to the jury have been made—but no word from the Black Woman.
In 1988, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. published an amazing collection of 30 works, the Schomburg Library of 19th Century Black Women Writers. Among them was Cooper’s Voice of the South. In his foreword, “In Her Own Write,” Gates focused on Cooper.
"... Anna Julia Cooper, a prototypical black feminist whose 1892 A Voice from the South can be considered to be one of the original texts of the black feminist movement. It was Cooper who first analyzed the fallacy of referring to 'the Black man' when speaking of black people and who argued that just as white men cannot speak through the consciousness of black men, neither can black men “fully and adequately …reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.” Gender and race, she argues, cannot be conflated except in the instance of a black woman's voice and it is this voice which must be uttered and to which we must listen"
And so 1892 marks the birth of “intersectionality” as we know it today.
Naomi Extra, writing for VICE in 2018, added some important context to Cooper’s famed “passport” quote:
Cooper also challenged white feminists to broaden their notion of liberation to include women of color and Black men. She wrote in A Voice, “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. Now unless we are greatly mistaken the Reform of our day, known as the Women’s Movement, is essentially such an embodiment, if its pioneers could only realize it…”
Cooper’s work spans more than five decades; she continued to write nearly up until her death in 1964 at the age of 105. And yet her work isn’t widely known—a fact that speaks to the ways in which the very overlapping oppressions that she fought against likely affected the canonization of her work. Scholar Shirley Moody-Turner has called attention, for example, to the troubling resistance that Cooper faced from African-American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois, who regularly rejected her work for publication in The Crisis, an African-American magazine he edited in the 1920s and 30s.
Cooper’s intersectional approach and her critiques of white suffragists are also explored in a 2019 Atlantic story, though I do wish writer Hannah Giorgis, a.k.a. @ethiopienne, had used “suffragist” in her title, rather than the pejorative “suffragettes.”
(Cooper) would go on to spend most of her long academic and community–oriented career living in Washington, D.C., where she helped establish the Colored Women’s League (which later became part of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, led by the likes of Mary Church Terrell, the organization’s first president). As white women across America endeavored to secure voting rights for themselves—and made calculated choices to exclude black people from those efforts—Cooper produced some of the most foundational analysis of injustice in the United States, most notably the overlaps of racism and sexism. More than a century later, Cooper’s frustration with white religious and educational figures has numerous modern parallels: Racism remains deeply embedded in many evangelical institutions, health centers, and schools.
Giorgis makes a key point with this quote from Cooper:
“A white woman said to me: ‘I cannot hold mothers’ meetings in connection with my school, or in any way touch the social life of its people,’” she wrote. “This woman is, and has been for years, principal of a colored school in the south.” In revealing this principal’s refusal to engage the mothers of her students, Cooper made a two-part critique: She called into question the legitimacy of white-led educational spaces for black students and took direct aim at the putative benevolence of the white people who lead them. How, Cooper seemed to wonder, can someone who wouldn’t grant black mothers access to her home be trusted to shape their children’s views of the world?
Cooper’s critique brings to mind some of the contemporary debates over the way the educational system privileges white teachers who have inadequate anti-racist training.
Those of you who pay attention to stamps may remember that, in 2009, Cooper was honored as part of the USPS Black Heritage Series.
With the 32nd stamp in its Black Heritage series, the U.S. Postal Service® honors Anna Julia Cooper, an educator, scholar, feminist, and activist who gave voice to the African-American community during the 19th and 20th centuries, from the end of slavery to the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The stamp features a portrait of Cooper created by Kadir Nelson, San Diego, California, who based his painting on an undated photograph.
For those of you who wish to explore Cooper’s work further, Howard University is home to the Anna Julia Cooper Collection.
You can also get involved with a Transcription Project.
I smiled when I heard these young sisters from the Anna Julia Cooper Digital Project add their voices to the effort with a beautiful rendition of the black national anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Thank you for joining me once again to celebrate the contributions of black women, not only during Women’s History Month, but as a key part of our nation’s history as a whole. Stay tuned for more throughout the year ahead.