Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)

Hallie Q. Brown--teacher, international lecturer, social activist, and herself a "woman of distinction"--recreates, along with twenty-eight contributors , the lives of sixty remarkable Afro-American women, all born in the United States and Canada between the mid 1740s and the end of the nineteenth century. First published in 1926, Homespun Heroines tells the tales of slaves and social workers, artists and activists, cake makers and homemakers. In so doing, it offers unusual insight into female networks, patterns of voluntary association, work, religion, family life, and black women's culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.