ABSTRACT
Through the voice of Anna Julia Cooper, I fi nd a black woman interrogating and professing multiple subject positions not in the twenty-fi rst century but at the close of the nineteenth. Industrialization, progressive era politics, and social confl ict defi ne the late nineteenth-century America as “transitional and unsettled,” it seemed that the status of a black woman was not of any real signifi cance. When we think about nationalism in the late-nineteenth century, scholars discount black women, but if we think about the region of the South and the project of reunifi cation, new subjects appear to us. The status of a Southern black woman is more pronounced when juxtaposed to the forces of sexism and racism combined with economic and political problems as well as social movements to “uplift” those in need. Cooper, taken as a case study, was disenfranchised (like most black men and all women) and faced gender discrimination in employment and at educational institutions, yet, as a public intellectual, she is empowered by her perceived marginality to deliver notice to antagonists in A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South. She helps scholars today see that social change in the late nineteenth century happened as a result of the most marginalized social actors. Cooper’s recognition of how subjective and objective realities of black women can affect how they experience and understand societal changes inspired this book’s critique of the South.1
