Belabored Professions : Narratives of African American Working Womanhood

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. Race, Work, And Literary Authority In The Narrative Of Sojourner Truth -- The View From Below : Menial Labor And Self-reliance In Harriet Wilson's Our Nig -- Enterprising Women And The Labors Of Femininity : Eliza Potter, Cincinnati Hairdresser -- Behind The Scenes Of Black Labor : Elizabeth Keckley And The Scandal Of Publicity. Xiomara Santamarina. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [171]-210) And Index. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. According to nineteenth-century racial uplift ideology, African American women served their race best as reformers and activists, or as "doers of the word." This book examines the autobiographies of four women who diverged from that ideal and defended the legitimacy of their self-supporting wage labor I begin this story of African American womanhood, antebellum work, and literary authority with Sojourner Truth, one of the best-known antislavery and women's rights reformers in her time and in our own.