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 Kec...