"As black American women, we are born into a mystic sisterhood, and we live our lives within a magic circle, a realm of shared language, reference, and allusion within the veil of our blackness and our femaleness. We have been as invisible to the dominant culture as rain; we have been knowers, but we have not been known." Joanne Braxton argues for a redefinition of the genre of black American autobiography to include the images of women as well as their memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, and journals—as a corrective to both black and feminist literary criticism. Beginning with slave narratives and concluding with modern autobiography, she deals with individual works as representing stages in a continuum and situates these works in the context of other writings by both black and white writers. Braxton demonstrates that the criteria used to define the slave narrative genre are inadequate for analyzing Harriet "Linda Brent" Jacobs's pseudonymously publishedIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself(1861). She examines "sass" as a mode of women's discourse and a weapon of self-defense, and she introduces the "outraged mother" as a parallel to the articulate hero archetype. Not even emancipation authorized black women to define themselves or address an audience. Late-nineteenth-century accounts in the form of confessional spiritual autobiographies, travelogue/adventure stories, and slave memoirs enabled such women as Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Elizabeth Keckley, Susie King Taylor, as well as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth to tell their own extraordinary stories and to shed light on the thousands of lives obscured by illiteracy and sexual and racial oppression. In her diaries, Charlotte Forten Grimké, the gifted poet, epitomizes the problems faced by a well-educated, extremely articulate black woman attempting to find a public voice in America. Moving into the twentieth century, Braxton analyzes the memoir of Ida B. Wells, journalist and anti-lynching activist, and the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Era Bell Thompson. They represent the first generation of black female autobiographers who did not continually come into contact with former slaves and who transcended the essential struggle for survival that occupied earlier writings. For the contemporary black woman autobiographer, the quest for personal fulfillment is the central theme. Braxton concludes with Maya Angelou'sI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1996), which represents the black woman of the 1960s who has found the place to recreate the self in her own image—the place all the others had been searching for. Author note:Joanne M. Braxtonis Cummings Professor of American Studies and English at the College of William and Mary and author ofSometimes I think of Maryland, a collection of poems.

Argues for a redefinition of the genre of black American autobiography to include the images of women as well as their memoirs, reminiscences, diaries, and journals - as a corrective to both black and feminist literary criticism.

Major Health Crisis Among Black Women Generated from Systemic Racism “Marita Golden’s The Strong Black Woman busts the myth that Black women are fierce and resilient by letting the reader in under the mask that proclaims ‘Black don’t crack.’” ―Karen Arrington, coach, mentor, philanthropist, and author of NAACP Image Award-winning Your Next Level Life Sarton Women’s Book Award #1 New Release in Reference Meet Black women who have learned through hard lessons the importance of self-care and how to break through the cultural and family resistance to seeking therapy and professional mental health care. The Strong Black Woman Syndrome. For generations, in response to systemic racism, Black women and African American culture created the persona of the Strong Black Woman, a woman who, motivated by service and sacrifice, handles, manages, and overcomes any problem, any obstacle. The syndrome calls on Black women to be the problem-solvers and chief caretakers for everyone in their lives―never buckling, never feeling vulnerable, and never bothering with their pain. Hidden mental health crisis of anxiety and depression. To be a Black woman in America is to know you cannot protect your children or guarantee their safety, your value is consistently questioned, and even being “twice as good” is often not good enough. Consequently, Black women disproportionately experience anxiety and depression. Studies now conclusively connect racism and mental health―and physical health. Take care of your emotional health. You deserve to be emotionally healthy for yourself and those you love. More and more young Black women are re-examining the Strong Black Woman syndrome and engaging in self-care practices that change their lives. Hear stories of Black women who: Asked for help Built lives that offer healing Learned to accept healing If you have read The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health, The Racial Healing Handbook, or Black Fatigue, The Strong Black Woman is your next read.

This History explores innovations in African American autobiography since its inception, examining the literary and cultural history of Black self-representation amid life writing studies. By analyzing the different forms of autobiography, including pictorial and personal essays, editorials, oral histories, testimonials, diaries, personal and open letters, and even poetry performance media of autobiographies, this book extends the definition of African American autobiography, revealing how people of African descent have created and defined the Black self in diverse print cultures and literary genres since their arrival in the Americas. It illustrates ways African Americans use life writing and autobiography to address personal and collective Black experiences of identity, family, memory, fulfillment, racism and white supremacy. Individual chapters examine scrapbooks as a source of self-documentation, African American autobiography for children, readings of African American persona poems, mixed-race life writing after the Civil Rights Movement, and autobiographies by African American LGBTQ writers.

"Tomeiko Ashford Carter offers insight into the true-to-life work of a black female preacher in nineteenth-century America and shows how she helped start a revolution of "spirit writing,' a sanctuary where authors could create powerful leading heroines who live by their own brands of Christian theology. Carter also calls attention to subsequent black female writers whose fiction demonstrates the legacies of life and spirit-writing. She does not leave out black male writers whom she discovers have created their own versions of divine women since the nineteenth-century. Indeed, Power Divine provides unique insight into compelling "divine" characters."--BOOK JACKET.

The first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women's autobiography. Essays from 39 prominent critics and writers explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe. A list of more than 200 women's autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

With grace and insight, celebrated writer bell hooks untangles the complex personae of women writers. Born and raised in the rural South, hooks learned early the power of the written word and the importance of speaking her mind. Her passion for words is the heartbeat of this collection of essays. Remembered Rapture celebrates literacy, the joys of reading and writing, and the lasting power of the book. Once again, these essays reveal bell hooks's wide-ranging intellectual scope; she is a universal writer addressing readers and writers everywhere.

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. In bearing witness to that era, these militant newsmakers wrote in part to educate and to mobilize their anticipated readers. In this way, Davis's Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Shakur's Assata (1987), and Brown's A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (1992) can all be read as extensions of the writers' political activism during the 1960s. Margo V. Perkins's critical analysis of their books is less a history of the movement (or of women's involvement in it) than an exploration of the politics of storytelling for activists who choose to write their lives. Perkins examines how activists use autobiography to connect their lives to those of other activists across historical periods, to emphasize the link between the personal and the political, and to construct an alternative history that challenges dominant or conventional ways of knowing. The histories constructed by these three women call attention to the experiences of women in revolutionary struggle, particularly to the ways their experiences have differed from men's. The women's stories are told from different perspectives and provide different insights into a movement that has been much studied from the masculine perspective. At times they fill in, complement, challenge, or converse with the stories told by their male counterparts, and in doing so, hint at how the present and future can be made less catastrophic because of women's involvement. The multiple complexities of the Black Power movement become evident in reading these women's narratives against each other as well as against the sometimes strikingly different accounts of their male counterparts. As Davis, Shakur, and Brown recount events in their lives, they dispute mainstream assumptions about race, class, and gender and reveal how the Black Power struggle profoundly shaped their respective identities.

A landmark collection documenting the social, political, and artistic lives of African American women throughout the tumultuous nineteenth century. Named one of NPR's Best Books of 2017. The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers is the most comprehensive anthology of its kind: an extraordinary range of voices offering the expressions of African American women in print before, during, and after the Civil War. Edited by Hollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., this collection comprises work from forty-nine writers arranged into sections of memoir, poetry, and essays on feminism, education, and the legacy of African American women writers. Many of these pieces engage with social movements like abolition, women’s suffrage, temperance, and civil rights, but the thematic center is the intellect and personal ambition of African American women. The diverse selection includes well-known writers like Sojourner Truth, Hannah Crafts, and Harriet Jacobs, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Sheppard, who offers a firsthand account of life in the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Taken together, these incredible works insist that the writing of African American women writers be read, remembered, and addressed. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Classic African American Women's Narratives offers teachers, students, and general readers a one-volume collection of the most memorable and important prose written by African American women before 1865. The book reproduces the canon of African American women's fiction and autobiography during the slavery era in U.S. history. Each text in the volume represents a "first." Maria Stewart's Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality (1831) was the first political tract authored by an African American woman. Jarena Lee's Life and Religious Experience (1836) was the first African American woman's spiritual autobiography. The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) was the first slave narrative to focus on the experience of a female slave in the United States. Frances E. W. Harper's "The Two Offers" (1859) was the first short story published by an African American woman. Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) was the first novel written by an African American woman. Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was the first autobiography authored by an African American woman. Charlotte Forten's "Life on the Sea Islands" (1864) was the first contribution by an African American woman to a major American literary magazine (the Atlantic Monthly). Complemented with an introduction by William L. Andrews, this is the only one-volume collection to gather the most important works of the first great era of African American women's writing.