Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History)

Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how--and who--produced racial knowledge.

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• Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Justice, Power, and Politics)
• Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Politics and Culture in Modern America)
• Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-AmericanFeminist Thought
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
• Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C. (Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History)
• Gender and Jim Crow, Second Edition: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Gender and American Culture)