ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three nonfiction texts, Seven Years Among the Freedmen, First Days Amongst the Contrabands and A Voice from the South on education, all written by women teachers and published in the early 1890s. As Mary Helen Washington points out, most black women in 1892 were "sharecroppers, struggling farmers, or domestic servants", not hopeful applicants to the Corcoran or aspiring clubwomen like the women in A Voice. Using the notion of the feminist public sphere as a way to reconcile the demands of public schooling in the 1890s with the historical realities of white and black women's writing, teaching, and activism, the chapter examines the two teachers' memoirs, namely, Maria Waterbury and Elizabeth Hyde Botume. These two texts are informed by the clubs and clubwomen who were among these texts' intended audiences, as well as the history of Reconstruction education for former slaves.
