The Work of the Afro-American Woman (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)

Part intellectual history, part advice book, and part polemic, this collection of original essays and poetry presents a defense and celebration of the achievements--moral, material, intellectual, and artistic--of black women in Victorian America. Writing as a Christian, a mother, and a wife, Mrs. Mossell held exemplary models of black womanhood before the public eye, called for the end to caste and color discrimination, and challenged the so-called "cult of true womanhood." A source of instruction and inspiration in its own time, The Work of the Afro-American Woman today remains a valuable document of black American cultural and intellectual history and forges a powerful link between past and present.