Colored No More: Reinventing Black Womanhood in Washington, D.C.

by Treva B. Lindsey

Overview

Home to established African American institutions and communities, Washington, D.C., offered women in the New Negro movement a unique setting for the fight against racial and gender oppression. Colored No More traces how African American women of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century made significant strides toward making the nation's capital a more equal and dynamic urban center.

Treva B. Lindsey presents New Negro womanhood as a multidimensional space that included race women, blues women, mothers, white collar professionals, beauticians, fortune tellers, sex workers, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. Drawing from these differing but interconnected African American women's spaces, Lindsey excavates a multifaceted urban and cultural history of struggle toward a vision of equality that could emerge and sustain itself. Upward mobility to equal citizenship for African American women encompassed challenging racial, gender, class, and sexuality status quos. Lindsey maps the intersection of these challenges and their place at the core of New Negro womanhood.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252041020
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	03/29/2017
Series:	Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History
Pages:	204
Sales rank:	839,866
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Treva B. Lindsey is an associate professor of women's, gender, and sexuality studies at The Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Climbing the Hilltop: New Negro Womanhood at Howard University 25

2 Make Me Beautiful: Aesthetic Discourses of New Negro Womanhood 52

3 Performing and Politicizing "Ladyhood": Black Washington Women and New Negro Suffrage Activism 86

4 Saturday at the S Street Salon: New Negro Women Playwrights 111

Conclusion: Turn-of-the-Century Black Womanhood 137

Notes 145

Bibliography 159

Index 177

Editorial Reviews

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2017

"Treva Lindsey, in Colored No More, is as bold as the women about whom she writes. Fresh research, illuminated by feminist theory, reveals how 'New Negro Womanhood' became a framework through which African American women developed modern identities. The politics of respectability confront the politics of pleasure in this outstanding study."—Martha S. Jones, author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900


"Colored No More provokes important questions for African American historiography and should inform historians' telling of urban black history after the Civil War. . . . Lindsey is precise and explicit in her interpretation of sources but seems also to recognize the present-day consequences of that interpretation."—H-Net Review [H-SHGAPE]


"Lindsey's Colored No More succeeds in changing the way we see African American women in the nation's capital from the 1890s through the 1920s. She innovatively and provocatively brings together histories of black women in higher education, beauty culture, the suffrage movement, and literary salons to prove that Washington was a site of New Negro ideology."—Journal of Southern History

"A major contribution to African American women's history that demonstrates urban black women's important political work. . . . Highly recommended."—Choice

"Lindsay successfully demonstrates that New Negro womanhood was a complex and capacious category accommodating a range of social, political, and sexual beliefs. . . . Colored No More is essential to the historiography of Washington, D.C."—Washington History

"Lindsey’s brilliantly researched book adds to black culture by mapping out the intersections of various identities of African-American women who shaped black life on a local and national scale."—Vibe

"Lindsey's book is an ambitious and creative undertaking of documenting African American women's activism in the nation's capital." —Journal of American Ethnic History

"An insightful book theoretically framed around ideas of 'Colored' and New Negro Womanhood. Lindsey demonstrates how Black women in Washington, D.C., labored and managed under the strains of Jim and Jane Crow, navigating structural disadvantages and persistent sexist exclusion in the nation's capital. Lindsey makes abundantly clear that the diverse efforts of Black Washingtonian women, from political organizing to cultural productions, pushed the boundaries of culturally accepted norms and laid a foundation for latter liberationist movements led by Black women within their communities both locally and nationally."—Randal Maurice Jelks, author of Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement: A Biography

"A timely and important book that centers black women in the New Negro era—a long overdue addition to the history and historiography."—Danielle L. McGuire, author of At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

From the Publisher