Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds

Abstract

Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds AUTHORS: KRISTIN WATERS AND CAROL B. CONAWAY UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT PRESS, BOSTON 2007 PRICE: $35.00 ISBN: 1584656340 In this collection called Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking their Minds, Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway have brought together some extraordinary essays about some extraordinary individuals. The extraordinary individuals are some, but not all, of the black American women intellectuals who flourished, approx., from 1830 to 1900. The essays are extraordinary, because they are about those women. When the collection mentioned was published in 2007, Waters was a professor of philosophy at Worcester State College, Worcester, MA, while Conaway was a professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Communications and the Women's Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH. In Women's Intellectual Traditions, the various different essays comprising the collection are arranged into six separate parts. In Part I, there are four essays set out under the heading W. Stewart: Feminism in Public Places; Part II, three essays, under the heading Incidents in the Lives: Free Women and Slaves; Part III, three essays, under the heading Hopkins, and Shadd Cary: Writing Our Way to Freedom; Part IV, three essays, under the heading Julia Cooper: A Voice; Part V, three essays, under the heading Leadership, Activism, and the Genius of Ida B. Wells; and Part VI, three essays, under the heading, Black Feminist Theory: from the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First. In Women's Intellectual Traditions, then, there are nineteen essays. In turn, the essays were written by nineteen women professors: for each essay, one professor, and, conversely, for each professor, one essay. Otherwise worth mentioning, in the collection, there is an introduction. In it, Waters and Conaway try to place black American women's intellectual traditions within some of another context: in effect, they place things in opposition to the negative opinion that either black American women's intellectual traditions do not exist, or, if they do exist, they exist without a long past. In addition, for each essay, Waters and Conaway tell its author, and they tell something about its content. When they looked at their collection, Waters and Conaway saw as one of its noteworthy features that four of its nineteen essays are about Maria W. Stewart. For, they state (Traditions 5) that This ... represents the first collection of essays about her work gathered in one volume. For them, then, and I agree with them, the inclusion of the essays focussing upon Stewart is a good thing. When I looked at their collection, I saw an even greater good. Specifically, with respect to black American women's intellectual traditions, ten of its nineteen essays are such that, partially or in their entirety, they are about the three women whom I think are the three most important black American women thinkers of the nineteenth century: Anna Julia Cooper, Frances E. W. Harper, and. Maria W. Stewart. Furthermore, in some sense, that is the right thing to have happened when we look at matters chronologically, quantitatively, and qualitatively. So, in what remains of this review, I have placed emphasis upon matters relating to them more than upon other things. Chronologically, then, for all of the nineteenth century black American women intellectuals mentioned and/or discussed in Waters and Conaway's collection, Maria W. Stewart is first among them. In order of time, with Phillis Wheatley as her one, and only one, predecessor, Stewart is the first black American woman for whom these three things are true: in her time, she distinguished herself by the attitudes she expressed concerning this or that social and political and/or racial and cultural topic, she left written works instantiating those attitudes, and, in our time, we have access to her attitudes, because we have access to those written works. …