HW QUESTIONS

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T. Travis

WST3015/AMH3931

Reading Questions, Week Four: Black and White WomenSisters in Struggle?

Sojourner Truth, I am as Strong as Any Man (1851)

Sojourner Truth/Frances Gage, Aint I a Woman? (1881)

Angela Davis, Reflections on the Black Womans Role (1971)

Liese Perrin, selections from Resisting Reproduction: Reconsidering Slave Contraception in the Old

South (2001)

NOTE: Keep Sarah Grimkes Letter VIII in mind as you read this weeks selections!

Answer the questions below concisely and completely, using complete sentences and quoting

from the texts when appropriate. When you quote, give page numbers from which your

quotations come.

Copy and paste the question onto your paper before you answer it.

You MUST answer the ten * questions; you MAY answer the others, or just use them to guide

your reading.

You do not need to have a Works Consulted for homework questions UNLESS you consultsources other than the assigned reading.

You may single or double space answers to questions, but DOUBLE space between each

question.

These formatting and technical guidelines apply to ALL the homework questions for the term.

Truth and Truth/Gage (1851/1881)

Reading note: Sojourner Truth (born Isabella Baumfree, ca. 1797-1883) was born in slavery in NewYork state. She was sold several times before she was 18, and finally escaped from her last master after

he promised to free her and then reneged on his promise. In freedom, she worked as a domestic in New

York City, was baptized as a Methodist, and became active in the abolitionist movement. In 1843 she

found herself called by God to preach, changed her name and became a traveling preacher and speaker on

behalf of abolition. Francis Gage (1808-1874) was a temperance and suffrage advocate and an ardentabolitionist. She was born in Ohio and lived there and in Missouri; her views on slavery and women's

rights were influenced by the anti-abolition violence in the states bordering the Mason-Dixon line in the

years following the Missouri Compromise. Gage was the keynote speaker at the 1851 Women's Rights

Convention in Akron, Ohio, and invited Truth to speak on the program. In 1881, she published a version

of the speech Truth made that day, which for many years was believed to be a literal transcription.

Several years ago, however, historian Nell Irvin Painter discovered a newspaper transcript of Truth's

speech dating from the time of the Convention itself; it is quite different from Gage's version. The

website shows the newspaper transcript in the right hand column, and the version Gage included in her

History of Womens Suffrage in 1881 on the left.

*1) How does the picture of an enslaved woman in the 1851 version of Truths speech compare/contrast

with depiction of enslaved women in Sarah Grimks Letter VIII?*2) Why might a white suffrage activist like Gage feel moved to revise the original in the way that she

did?

3) Was Gage right or wrong to make these changes?

TravisWST3015/Truth-Davis-Perrin q/Fall13


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Davis (1970)

Reading note: Davis writes in response to a highly publicized congressional report by Senator Daniel

Patrick Moynihan entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (1965). The Moynihan

Report, as it is frequently called, argues that contemporary African American individuals andneighborhoods are disadvantaged by what the report calls a tangle of pathology within the nuclear

family. The signs of that pathology are a high incidence of out-of-wedlock births, men who are absentor who fail as breadwinners, and a tradition of matriarchal or female-headed households. (If you want to,

you can check out the report here, on Quintard Taylors amazing Black Past website [full disclosure: I

have contributed to this site]). Keep this context in mind as you answer the following, and also note:

DAVISIS NOT A LIBERALFEMINIST! We are reading her here to get a perspective on the experiences of

enslaved black women that differs from that held by liberal white feminists in the 19 th century.

* 1. Davis states that small amount of literature about black women is outrageous (200). The overall

lack of literature is made worse by the way much existing literature (like the Moynihan Report) reinforces

fictitious clichs (3). What clich is the most prominent and annoying to her, and how does she propose

to debunk it?

* 2. According to Davis, how did the domestic space of living quarters put black slave women at thecenter of the slave community (205)?

* 3. Davis states that black women had to be annulled as woman (205) in order to be slaves. What

does she mean by this phrase? What effect did this annulment have on the gender relations between blackwomen and men in slave communities?

4. Davis describes several little-known examples of insurrection by enslaved women (208-09). What

issues is she hoping to illuminate by encouraging others to revisit the history of violent protest against

enslavement and womens role within it?

* 5 After providing several examples of the ways in which black women overtly resisted oppression,

Davis discusses the ways the threat of rape by white slave masters was used to control black women ANDblack men. How does her discussion of this differ from Grimks?

6. Why does Davis claim it is so necessary to invalidate the stereotype of the black female castrator

(216)?

* 7. Davis claims that "by virtue of the brutal force of circumstances, the black woman was assigned themission of promoting the consciousness and practice of resistance" (202). But how good would she have

been at educating children, picking the minister, and organizing benevolent enterprises? Seriously, how

does Davis's emphasis on the black woman's ROLE complicate Beecher's idea of women's NATURE?

Perrin, (2001)

Reading Note: Liese Perrin is a British historian who studies slavery in the United States. Thisarticle based on her research is aimed at other scholars in the field, so parts of it may seem hard

to understand or irrelevant to us. Do the best you can to ignore or read around those elements,and concentrate instead on understanding the reproduction resistance strategies she describes and

the rationales that lay behind them. Focus your reading on the following sections:

255-257 [up to contraception studies];

260-266 [Cotton Roots though this particular practice.];

http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/moynihan-report-1965http://www.blackpast.org/?q=primary/moynihan-report-1965


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272 [from Similarly]-274.

Note that the WPA (p. 255) was a federally funded project during the Great Depression (the

1930s), in which the government paid out-of-work anthropologists, journalists, historians, etc. totravel all over the country and collect the oral histories of formerly enslaved people. These WPA

narratives are one of Perrins main sources for information about contraception. Note that

capital (p. 256 and elsewhere) is a term taken from Marxist economic theory that means valuefor owners.

1) The introduction to Perrins piece surveys a variety of existing sources that mentionbutdo not discuss in detailenslaved womens attempts to control their reproduction during

slavery times. Why have other historians not paid much attention to these attempts?

2) * In what way can the use of contraceptives and abortifacients within black families

under slavery be seen as a kind of strike (256) or slave resistance (261)?3) * In her conclusion, Perrin argues that attention to enslaved womens attempts to limit

their fertility is important as a way to counteract the stereotypical image of the black

woman as a doting, child-centered Mammy. Why is it important to her to suggest that

enslaved women might be rational and calculating in their desire to prevent conception(273)?

4) * How do Perrins arguments about enslaved women complement and complicate thosemade by Grimke in Letter VII? those made by Angela Davis in Reflections on the

Black Womens Role?


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