Page 105 →Five “Planting Good and Joy Instead”

Homespun Heroines reflects both the individual influence of Hallie Quinn Brown, editor and author of numerous sketches, and the collective influence of the other twenty-seven women who contributed sketches.⁴ In this way, the book is similar to other collective biographies of women of the period, which in literary scholar Alison Booth’s observation “value collaboration and imitation rather than originality.”⁵ Throughout her active century of life, Brown deployed rhetoric to inspire and equip other African Americans—especially women—to become leaders and advocates in their communities. Brown was herself a student and teacher of elocution, lecturer, and author of a textbook on the subject called Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations for School, Lyceum, and Parlor Entertainments. As such, she was familiar with the exemplar tradition in both the teaching and practice of rhetoric.⁶ According to her contemporary Mary McLeod Bethune, Brown was “a leader of great talents and many interests [. . .] an educator in the broadest sense of the word.”⁷ The collection’s index notes Brown as the author of twenty-one sketches, Maritcha R. Lyons as the author of eight, Anna H. Jones and Ora B. Stokes as the authors of three sketches each, Sarah L. Fleming as the author of two, and twenty-two other women each the author of one.⁸

All of the sketches focus on Black women, including both well-known figures such as Harriet Tubman and unfamiliar local characters such as “Aunt Mac.” As Randall K. Burkett explained, “Many of the writers knew their subjects personally, as mothers, grandmothers, or aunts; as teachers or mentors; or as friends; hence, the sketches are written with the special insight and appreciation that such familiarity can bring.”⁹ Although the vast majority of the sketches were composed specifically for this volume, Brown incorporated some previously published material, such as an obituary of Tubman from the American Review and a collection of short sketches about Black women pioneers in California. The sketches range widely in detail and length, anywhere from a short paragraph to fourteen pages. The sketches are accompanied by forty-five images, primarily photograph Page 108 →portraits of the subjects, some etchings, images of homes and, in one case, a photo of a historical marker.

The collection appeared alongside a small group of biographical texts by and about Black Americans during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rising literacy rates among African Americans since emancipation created new opportunities for disseminating Black histories in textual form.¹⁰ Accessible to a growing number of Black readers, biography collections served the critical rhetorical purpose of preserving and promoting accounts about African Americans to counter racist White accounts of the Black past.¹¹ Whitewashed histories were not simply a matter of words: They fed the White supremacist culture that led to intensified racial terror and violence across the United States. As Black Americans left behind the white-robed racism of the South for the covert discrimination of the North, Black arts and culture flourished in cities such as Chicago and New York. The Harlem Renaissance—or New Negro Movement, as that cultural period has been called more recently—also fostered attention to the historical experiences and creative contributions of Black Americans from the end of World War I into the 1930s. According to rhetoric scholar Eric King Watts, this movement “required a population of black folk who saw themselves (more or less) as public agents ‘free’ to form clubs, newspapers, and magazines” and thereby do “public work on behalf of African America.” Participants in this movement debated the meaning of art, history, music, literature and political activism to Black Americans. They acted and spoke publicly in ways that enacted their views that Black Americans deserved stories and images that built up their communities. Thus, as Watts has noted, “The New Negro Movement was, in part, a product of a special kairos.”¹² It was a time ripe for rhetorical and artistic work in Black communities—and for community memory work.

Biographical and historical texts by, about, and for Black Americans began to emerge in the 1890s and appeared steadily into the New Negro Movement. Although the number about women remained particularly small, Black authors and compilers produced a handful of biographical texts, beginning in 1891 with Susie I. Lankford Shorter’s The Heroines of African Methodism. Booth has suggested that the collections published in the 1890s appeared in direct response to the exclusion of African Americans from the planning and execution of the 1893 World’s Fair, discussed in chapter 3. Biographical collections about Black women—Shorter’s volume; Monroe A. Majors’s Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893); Lawson A. Scruggs’s Women of Distinction: Remarkable of Works and Page 109 →Invincible of Character (1893); and Mrs. N. F. [Gertrude E. H. Bustill] Mossell’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894)—proffered a critique of the unrepresentative White vision of womanhood being advanced by the World’s Fair and the World’s Congress of Representative Women by praising Black women who exemplified more expansive expressions of feminine virtue.¹³ In doing so, these collections also extended the work done by the public speakers to present exemplary women for emulation, described in chapter 2.

A fleet of important biographical texts also appeared in the 1920s, arriving in both the terrifying wake of the Red Summer of 1919 and the heady waves of the New Negro Movement. From rural Elaine, Arkansas, to Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street,” to Rosewood, Florida, Black men returned from the First World War to find their communities under attack by White assailants. Yet in 1926—the same year when Homespun Heroines was published—Zora Neale Hurston wrote one of her first plays; Langston Hughes published his first collection of poetry, The Weary Blues; and historian Carter G. Woodson inaugurated “Negro History Week.” Other key texts published during the 1920s included Elizabeth Ross Haynes’s Unsung Heroes (1921), a collection of biographical sketches about Black men and women, and The Brownies’ Book (1920–1921), the monthly children’s periodical published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and edited by W. E. B. Du Bois and Jessie Redmon Fauset, which featured life sketches of individuals of African descent.¹⁴ Brown’s compilation appears to be the only one of these early texts collaboratively constructed and exclusively produced by and about Black women. This distinction makes Brown’s text a rich and unique instance of multibiography and Black women’s community memory work during the period.

Brown’s volume participates in the rhetorical tradition of collective biographies of women, which Booth detailed in her extensive study How to Make It as a Woman. According to Booth, “Group biohistoriography or prosopography has been instrumental in constructing modern subjectivities and social differences.”¹⁵ Differences in racial and gender identity figure particularly prominently in texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Americans were actively renegotiating the social and legal meaning of such differences.¹⁶ Biographical collections (or “multibiographies,” as Booth also called them) shape not only identities but also the communities in which those identities exist, from the neighborhood to the Page 110 →nation. Multibiographies may exercise more persuasive power over their readers than individual biographies, because the former outline explicit criteria for selecting their subjects. Identifying such criteria entails isolating specific characteristics and values for consideration by readers. Booth explained that collective biographies require “an additional rhetorical frame besides that of any biography: the definition of the category or principle of selection,” which “prevents the illusion of a transparent, objective account of a person’s life.”¹⁷ In this sense, collective biographies are more plainly rhetorical than individual biographies.

A unique multibiography, Homespun Heroines rewards close attention because it is a collaborative, collective project of community memory work about Black women. Furthermore, it was produced by “self-confident and historically self-conscious” Black women who not only were committed to Black women’s flourishing but also exhibited sophisticated rhetorical sensibilities. ¹⁸ Although editor Hallie Quinn Brown did not reflect at length on the principle that guided her selection of subjects, she and her coauthors clearly had rhetorical designs to deploy these Black women’s stories to uplift, as they might have said, Black readers and communities. Brown’s introduction to Homespun Heroines implies a principle of selection by succinctly describing the collection’s subjects as “history-making women of our race” and “our pioneer women.”¹⁹ By using “our,” Brown both claimed these women as part of her community and identified them as fellow African Americans, although no specific racial category is used in either Brown’s introduction or Josephine Turpin Washington’s foreword. Brown also redefined what “history-making” might mean for “women of [her] race,” simply by claiming that such women were historically significant. Focusing on Black women during this time period thus constitutes a departure from—and, implicitly, a critique of—previous multibiographies’ historical focus on White women.²⁰

The Homespun Heroines collection provides a rare glimpse into middle-class African-American women’s community memory work and theories during the early twentieth century. This volume is particularly notable because it signifies a collective rhetorical effort by Black women to preserve and pass on memories, and it utilizes traditional rhetorical modes to advance alternative memories. Although minimal research in rhetorical studies has explicitly examined Black women’s community memory work, studies by Rosalyn Collings Eves and Patricia Davis have begun to theorize Black women’s memory practices by exploring the cases of cookbooks and historical reenactment, respectively.²¹ Both Eves and Davis have shown how Page 111 →African-American women of the recent past worked cooperatively, using traditional means such as cooking and dress, to resist mainstream memories of Black women. Eves’s analysis of three cookbooks produced by the National Council of Negro Women in the 1990s, in particular, highlights the collective rhetorical work of such texts. Eves argued that the “cookbooks offer a forum for multiple voices to be heard, and they represent a subtle refusal to accept the memories of African-American women dictated by voices other than their own.”²² Davis’s study of contemporary Black women who were engaged in the embodied practice of historical reenactment of the antebellum and Civil War periods illustrates the importance of traditional values as a starting point for critique. Davis examined specifically how reenactors “combine an embodied performance of respectability with a narrative performance of black women’s historical agency.”²³ Rather than being only a simplistic accommodation to dominant White, patriarchal culture, the performance of respectability enabled Black women to gain rhetorical traction. As Davis argued, the “traditionalism” performed by these historical reenactors became for them a “site of resistance to both dominant structures of representation and mainstream feminist discourse.”²⁴ In a similar fashion, the authors of the Homespun Heroines sketches used the traditional genre of biography to offer their own arguments about what constituted historical significance, virtuous character, meaningful lives, and even physical beauty. Even merely by presenting Black women as exhibiting such admirable features, these authors resisted White mainstream memories and actively theorized what better memories should look like for their communities. However, as I describe in this chapter’s analysis, the volume is not primarily a reaction or response to histories dominated by Whiteness but a positive exhortation to gratitude for and joy in the richness of remembered Black womanhood.

As Matthew Houdek and Kendell R. Phillips noted, “our memories are not solely constituted by how we envision the past, but also by how those visions make us feel.”²⁵ Studies of public memory share a widespread assumption that public memory is “animated by affect,” as Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian Ott put it. They continued, “Public memory embraces events, people, objects, and places that it deems worthy of preservation, based on some kind of emotional attachment.”²⁶ Public memory can emerge from emotional attachments; it can also invite emotional attachments. Homespun Heroines, as an artifact of public memory, deliberately aims to cultivate Page 112 →certain kinds of feelings in its readers through meditation on the lives of Black women. Such feelings, I argue, are meant not to be kept as individual and private but shared by members of a community. Therefore, this chapter draws inspiration from work that explores a constellation of concepts related to “public feelings.”²⁷ According to Ann Cvetkovich, focusing on public feelings shows how “political identities are implicit within structures of feeling, sensibilities, everyday forms of cultural expression and affiliation that may not take the form of recognizable organizations or institutions.”²⁸ Lisa M. Corrigan draws this approach into the orbit of rhetoric in Black Feelings. Corrigan emphasizes what Agnes Heller described as “cognitive feelings,” which “function as pedagogical tools in building identification with and against objects of affection and derision.”²⁹ As these passages indicate, public feelings connect human beings in politically salient ways, although those connections are not always expressed in traditional political forms.

Homespun Heroines is an “everyday form of cultural expression and affiliation,” as well as a repository of “objects of affection”—the biographical subjects—that invites affiliation through the sharing of certain community feelings. The volume fosters a variety of connections among Black women: connections among their creators (e.g., Brown and her coauthors), between the authors and their audience, and between the biographical subjects and likely readers. The affiliations created are both contemporaneous (among women of the same moment) and transhistorical (between women of different historical periods). Brown and her coauthors craft life stories that establish and maintain connections among Black women by emphasizing feelings of gratitude and joy. The feelings of gratitude and joy serve, in turn, as a resource for Black women oriented toward organizing and activism.³⁰

As communal feelings, joy and gratitude are expressed and produced, in part, through rhetorical texts. The American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology defines joy as “a feeling of extreme gladness, delight, or exultation of the spirit arising from a sense of well-being or satisfaction,” which can be experienced as passive or active. Active joy involves a “desire to share one’s feelings with others” and is “associated with more engagement in the environment than is passive joy.”³¹ The concept of active joy aligns with the more pointedly political practice of Black joy. Damaris Dunn and Bettina L. Love define Black joy as “the radical imagination of collective memories of resistance, trauma, survival, love, and cultural modes of expression.”³² Although Black joy in itself is by no means news, amplifying Page 113 →Black joy has become a critical political and social task in the 2010s and 2020s for Black people around the world who have been inundated with media representations of Black suffering and death. Numerous Black scholars, thinkers, and creatives have theorized Black joy as a mode of resistance to and expression of liberation from White supremacy.³³ For instance, considering Black joy in the context of Michael Brown’s murder in Fergusion, Missouri, Javon Johnson viewed it as “a real and imagined site of utopian possibility.” Johnson continued, “More than a method to endure, Black joy allows us the space to stretch our imaginations beyond what we previously thought possible and allows us to theorize a world in which white supremacy does not dictate our everyday lives.”³⁴ Philosopher Lindsey Stewart theorizes a “politics of Black joy,” reframing it as a form of productive refusal. Like Johnson, she views Black joy as a communal practice for Black people outside of the constraints of Whiteness: “While resistance foregrounds an oppositional relation between oppressed and oppressors, joy foregrounds a flourishing relation of the self to the self (or, in the case of Black joy, how Black folks relate to each other).”³⁵ Rather than covering over or negating pain, Black joy asserts Black life in the presence of suffering. Black joy also connects Black people to one another through shared public feeling. As such, the purposes and functions of Black joy parallel the purposes and functions of community memory work.

Whereas twenty-first-century conceptualizations of Black joy are closely tied to contemporary public movements such as Black Lives Matter, practices of Black joy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have been more limited to Black community spaces such as churches and dance halls. Yet the expressions of feeling in these varied Black spaces were also fraught by the status anxieties plaguing African-American communities during this time period. For instance, Tera W. Hunter documented how, in the early twentieth century, debates over certain kinds of dancing in Southern Black churches and “jook joints” revealed tensions among Black Americans of different class backgrounds.³⁶ Hunter noted that “it was not dancing per se that the black elites rejected” but the public nature and “social atmosphere” of dance halls and “Holy Roller” churches.³⁷ Lindsey Stewart’s analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s essays argues that intense and important discussions about Black joy occurred during the time of the New Negro Movement, when Homespun Heroines was published.³⁸ Unbridled public expressions of joy such as vivacious dancing would likely have been frowned upon by the middle-class Black women creators of Homespun Page 114 →Heroines. However, more cloistered expressions of joy and celebration—especially of kind, virtuous, and accomplished Black women—would have operated within the bounds of propriety while still creating opportunities for cultivating bonds of public feeling.³⁹

Whereas Black joy is deeply communal and political, gratitude is typically framed as individual and personal. For instance, the field of positive psychology and popular discourse in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century has touted the role of gratitude in personal happiness.⁴⁰ Psychology researchers Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough identify gratitude as both an emotion and a virtue.⁴¹ As an emotion, gratitude comprises “pleasant feelings” about receiving a benefit “freely bestowed.”⁴² As a virtue, gratitude has been viewed as a “necessary ingredient for the moral personality” and essential to live a good life. It is something that a moral person should feel toward another person (or entity) who has conferred a benefit.⁴³ The person toward whom one feels gratitude can be present (such as a parent or partner) or absent (such as in the practice of expressing gratitude to one’s ancestors). Thus, gratitude has the capacity to solidify social relationships both in the same moment and across different historical periods. Gratitude is important to the study of memory, because it has the capacity to connect individuals and communities across time.⁴⁴ As Georg Simmel put it, “Gratitude, as it were, is the moral memory of [hu]mankind.”⁴⁵ Christel N. Temple emphasized the special significance of Black gratitude through her concept of “ancestor acknowledgment,” one of the features of Black cultural mythology. This concept both “normalizes the layered consciousness that the living, the deceased, and the unborn are active and interrelated modes of existence” and “affirms that any life lived well deserves gratitude and appreciation.”⁴⁶ Although gratitude has been valorized as a praiseworthy feeling, it also has the potential to operate unethically in situations of marked social inequity.⁴⁷ For Black women who were expected to perform gratitude toward White benefactors and even their Black male counterparts in unjust contexts, cultivating gratitude toward Black women past and present serves a similar function to contemporary Black joy: It expresses freedom from White supremacy and patriarchy by solidifying affiliative bonds among Black women.

Attending to positive feelings produced through memory, such as joy and gratitude, deepens scholarship on Black memory that has emphasized trauma. Following scholars such as André Brock Jr., Badia Ahad-Legardy, Catherine Knight-Steele and Jessica Lu, Lindsey Stewart, and Christel N. Page 115 →Temple, I recognize the traumatic inheritance of slavery and racism while also seeking to understand the rhetorical power of other Black feelings.⁴⁸ Brock argues that Blackness is, in part, defined by its ability to encompass both the positive and negative aspects of Black experiences. Defending this view, he notes that “while racism is an inexhaustible fountain of energy for whiteness, it is only part of how Blackness navigates the world.”⁴⁹ Ahad-Legardy develops a similar argument through the cultural analysis of Black memory and nostalgia. She argues that relying on trauma as the “largely uncontested and seemingly natural framework for interpreting black memory” affords “little space to apprehend other modalities of memory operative in African American culture.”⁵⁰ Ahad-Legardy’s development of the theory and practice of “Afro-nostalgia” illustrates the need for work about Black American memory to attend to the coexistence of pain and joy in Black life.⁵¹ Although Brock and Ahad-Legardy examine contemporary examples such as Black cyberculture, cuisine, music, and social media, analyzing a historical example such as Homespun Heroines illustrates how for generations Black American communities have cultivated positive shared feelings such as joy and gratitude as a mechanism of survival and reservoir of political agency. Examining this collection of biographies also shows how memory work—and especially community memory work—operates affectively.

Brown’s introduction to Homespun Heroines foregrounds such feelings as it outlines the volume’s four main purposes: to express gratitude to the collection’s subjects, to present accurate historical accounts, to preserve the stories of notable women, and to bring joy to authors and audiences alike. Emotional terminology predominates, especially in the descriptions of the first, third, and fourth purposes. Brown described her “appreciation” and “regard” for her subjects, her “anxious desire” to safeguard their memory, and her “pleasure” in producing the volume as well as the pleasure she anticipates for readers. The feeling of gratitude is foregrounded in the introduction, which opens by stating, “This book is presented as an evidence of appreciation and as a token of regard to the history-making women of our race.” This statement frames the volume as material proof of the “appreciation” and “regard” in which its authors hold the profiled subjects. The second clause of the sentence positions the biographees as the ones toward whom its authors express gratitude. In a possible gesture toward eavesdropping audiences,⁵² Brown used passive construction so that the sentence might be read by those outside the community as evidence of Page 116 →Black women’s gratitude and, by extension, moral rectitude. However, her focus remained on the primary audience of Black women readers. Brown concluded the introduction by emphasizing the positive feelings that derive from learning about Black women’s lives. Intertwining her authorial perspective with readerly experience, Brown conveyed her hope that the audience “may find as much pleasure in its perusal as the writer had in its making.”⁵³ Brown here identified pleasure—closely related, though not identical, to joy—as a goal and thereby implicitly endorsed it as an appropriate response to reading the volume. Although the word “pleasure” in this passage functions conventionally and does not evoke the erotic undertones of the word as used by contemporary Black feminist scholars, it nonetheless names positive public feelings produced in the context of community memory work. The focus here is not on the feeling of pleasure itself but on the bonds that enjoyment creates. By naming a common source of pleasure, Brown dissolved barriers between author and audience and invited readers to identify with her and her co-creators.

Difficulties are ubiquitous in the stories of Homespun Heroines. In detailing the women’s lives, the sketches identify both personal hardship, such as being orphaned at a young age, and shared oppression, such as being an enslaved woman. Struggle is present both as a historical fact and as a rhetorical feature of the narratives. Although individual histories vary, almost all Black women who lived before the mid-twentieth century faced significant obstacles, whether they were enslaved, orphaned, widowed, bereaved by the death of their children, laid low by illness, or some unhappy combination thereof. Struggle, in the lives of these women, is a fact. Struggle, in the narratives recounting their lives, is also used rhetorically to frame and amplify the women’s contributions. For instance, Brown’s introduction points out that the women profiled in the book accomplished great things “under the most trying and adverse circumstances.”⁵⁴ Brown connected this emphasis to a central purpose of the collection—specifically, to provide for young people an “instructive light on the struggles endured and the obstacles overcome by our pioneer women.”⁵⁵ Here Brown argued that remembering women who endured struggle and overcame obstacles serves as a source of encouragement for those who remember them. As Brown’s introduction implies, viewing these women’s lives in light of their struggles emphasizes both the contrast and the connection between the two.

Page 117 →Enslavement constitutes an enduring source of struggle in the biographies. Although many of the women profiled were born to parents who had been enslaved, Randall Burkett has noted that only thirteen were enslaved themselves.⁵⁶ These thirteen include well-known figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, as well as more obscure women such as Dinah Cox, Caroline Sherman Andrews-Hill, and Frances Jane Brown (Hallie Quinn Brown’s mother). The sketches sensitively portray the range of experiences of slavery. For instance, the sketch of Andrews-Hill notes that her parents occupied relatively powerful positions in the hierarchy of enslavement on their plantation—the father was the foreman, and the mother was a “favored and highly esteemed member of her owner’s household.”⁵⁷ Their daughter was similarly positioned and thereby able to marry an educated enslaved man. The narrator explains that “this noble-spirited couple did not allow the strenuous task of their own family life to render them narrow and selfish, but both united in striving to brighten the lives of their fellows in bondage.”⁵⁸ This passage acknowledges the “strenuous” nature of their lives while also noting their commitment to bringing joy to their enslaved community. The sketch of Dinah Cox highlights a different but not uncommon experience of recently freed people: being defrauded of rightfully inherited or earned property by Whites.⁵⁹ In cases of famous women who had been enslaved, the sketches emphasize that severely marginalized status to underscore the subject’s later social mobility. The story of Fanny Jackson Coppin, for instance, begins with such a framing, stating that this woman “rose from the depth of slavery and became one of the most eminent educators of this country.”⁶⁰ The narrative about Harriet Tubman describes her rise in even more vivid language. Comparing Tubman with Joan of Arc, the sketch claims that both women’s names should be placed “high in the galaxy of fame,” Tubman even more so because of her origin “under the galling yoke of slavery.”⁶¹ The stories about Coppin and Tubman both foreground their early enslavement to dramatize their later achievements and to argue that, because of their hardships, the accomplishments of Black women ought to be considered even more remarkable than those of the most lowly White women.⁶²

Although slavery was a hardship shared by all of the enslaved (and even some of the free, for those living in the wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, as some of the sketches argue⁶³), these women also experienced more personal struggles. The sketches note that several of them, such as Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, lost their parents when Page 118 →they were young. Of the fifty-three married women profiled, eleven of these were noted to have been widowed—and two women were widowed twice.⁶⁴ Sketches name many women who were thwarted in their pursuit of an education. For example, in the story of Coppin, Brown wrote that “the hardships of her childhood, the struggles for an education are sad to contemplate.”⁶⁵ As in the stories of enslavement, the sketches often document early difficulties to amplify later achievements. Coppin, for instance, graduated from Oberlin College as one of a few women allowed to take the “gentleman’s course.”⁶⁶

The sketches occasionally expand their view to consider the struggle of Black people more generally, thereby connecting the individual hardships of the women with the challenges of the race as whole. For example, in the story of Harriet Tubman, Brown compared the “struggles of the [White] pioneer mothers” to the “equally unique tales of the self-abnegation of the black woman of the South,” which were no less common.⁶⁷ Maritcha Lyons noted the racial terror faced by all Black Americans after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850. Lyons introduced the profile of Sarah Harris Fayerweather by explaining that free Blacks during this part of the antebellum period maintained “race loyalty” in the midst of enduring “a thralldom none the less vicious because invisible.”⁶⁸ Lyons’s sketches often draw connections between the individual subjects and the shared experiences of Black women. This rhetorical choice is illustrated in the narrative of Henrietta Cordelia Ray, which is introduced with a lengthy meditation on the importance of “the lives of even the obscure.” Lyons explained that “many, many, of ‘our women’” lived “under most untoward conditions.”⁶⁹ The sketch continues by noting that their experiences of life likely had “seasons of unrequited toil, undue anxiety, and devastating pain.”⁷⁰ The sketch as a whole argues that learning about the lives of these little-known women remains essential because their hardships were common and, therefore, more relatable. Lyons’s sketches also reveal the rhetorical implications of mixing the famous and the obscure in this collection, as discussed later.

Throughout the collection, the authors name and confront their subjects’ struggles, both shared hardships produced directly by the racialized caste system and personal challenges resulting from other causes. Struggle thus becomes a consistent framework for interpreting the lives of these women. However, the sketches do not only narrate stories of pain but also describe the pursuit of joy in the midst of struggle. This combination resonates with what Temple has characterized as an “African-centered philosophy of heroism,” through which stories of Black heroes emphasize Page 119 →“unusual endurance, perseverance, physical strength, grit, and emotional resilience.”⁷¹ The figures presented in this collection provide exemplars, to use the language of chapter 2, for navigating and overcoming life’s inevitable struggles. As I discuss in the next two sections, weaving together joy and pain emerges as a key strategy for authors aiming to supply their readers with resources for resistance.

One of the distinctive features of this collection is its intentional undermining of the “great [wo]man” approach to biographies. Instead of praising only women who would be deemed historically significant by traditional standards, the volume argues that both extraordinary and ordinary women deserve gratitude.⁷² The title, Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, implies that the volume prioritizes lesser known “homespun heroines”; those “other women of distinction” become almost secondary. Many of the sketches strongly suggest that these categories at least overlap and, possibly, completely coincide. A few sketches remark on their subjects’ exceptional qualities, as when they attribute “uncommon intelligence” to poet Phillis Wheatley or describe Sojourner Truth as a “singular and impressive” figure and “orator of a superior type.”⁷³ Although the authors represented some women’s lives as exceptional, they also diminished the distance between everyday readers and extraordinary figures. Many authors thus argued that any reader could aspire to the extraordinary and that “ordinary” women, in fact, exhibit a quiet, overlooked greatness. The everyday eminence of these women is, in several cases, illustrated by citing the gratitude that others have expressed to them. Readers learn, for instance, of young mothers who were grateful for the generosity of “Aunt Mac,” successful students who were grateful for the influence of Miss Patterson, and parents who were grateful for the “devoted service” of teacher Miss Baldwin.⁷⁴

Brown’s sketch of Harriet Tubman presents an extraordinary woman who possessed remarkably ordinary qualities. On the opening page, Brown asserted that Tubman could be “justly styled a Homespun Heroine” and immediately followed that statement by claiming that Tubman is “in a class to herself.”⁷⁵ Brown juxtaposed Tubman’s exceptional achievements with her humbler characteristics throughout the sketch, subtly arguing that even ordinary women can achieve renown. A notable example appears in the beginning of the sketch, as the narrator explains that Tubman, also called “General Moses,” was “an Amazon in strength and endurance” who Page 120 →appeared to be “a most ordinary specimen of humanity” and “yet in point of courage, shrewdness, and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow men she had no equal.”⁷⁶ In this passage, Brown shifted back and forth between the exceptional (“an Amazon”) to ordinary and back again to exceptional (“she had no equal”), weaving these qualities together so that they became inseparable in her subject. Maritcha Lyons’s sketch of Tubman likewise dramatically juxtaposes such features, asserting that “in personal appearance, Harriet was ordinary to the point of repulsiveness.”⁷⁷ This interweaving seems geared toward engaging the audience, who might otherwise tune out endless hymns praising godlike figures. Instead, the rhetorical tacking between extraordinary and ordinary invites readers to recognize themselves in even the most exceptional lives.

In an inverse rhetorical move, other sketches select obscure women to argue that an ordinary life can be viewed as extraordinary. Several of Maritcha Lyons’s profiles take up this theme. For instance, Lyons begins her sketch of New England abolitionist Sarah Harris Fayerweather by describing the nineteenth century’s “great political activity,” which swept up the famous and the unknown alike.⁷⁸ The narrator explains that she chose Fayerweather “to exemplify a group of unhonored heroes” who were often considered “too commonplace to merit record or comment.”⁷⁹ Connecting this sketch to others on this theme, Lyons stated that Fayerweather was “representative,” and, in fact, that such women “were to be found everywhere.”⁸⁰ Fayerweather’s virtuous life and actions were typical, not exceptional, thus making her all the more meaningful as an exemplar to contemporary Black women. Sarah Fayerweather and “her noble band of sisters,” declared Lyons, are “a precious legacy to our women of today.”⁸¹

Lyons’s introduction to her profile of poet Henrietta Cordelia Ray articulates a similar view through the use of natural metaphors. This eloquent passage exemplifies that language: “A tiny rill has its mission as well as a majestic river. Aggregated rain drops unite to form mighty billows. The faint flush of dawn though lacking the resplendence of cloudless noon, is none the less a direct emanation from the primal source of light.”⁸² By fashioning Ray’s poetic contributions as the “tiny rill,” “rain drop,” or “faint flush of dawn,” Lyons both established Ray as part of a larger artistic force and associated her with more illustrious Black female writers such as Phillis Wheatley and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.⁸³ The sketch argues emphatically that it is worthwhile to know about women like Ray, because even a “minor bard” can “give and receive joy in proportion to [her] ability and [. . .] opportunity.”⁸⁴ Lyons explained that most of her biographical subjects Page 121 →likewise “had during their existence reputations that were limited and local” yet influenced many in their families and communities.⁸⁵ Although Lyons did not represent unfamiliar individuals as identical to figures such as Harriet Tubman, she argued that reading about lesser known women was especially edifying because they were nearer to the experiences of readers. “Any record of good repute attached to the lives of even the obscure,” Lyons opined, “embraces much that is illuminating . . . [to] every day folk.”⁸⁶ She later further elevated these obscure individuals by remarking that “all consistently good women are truly great women.”⁸⁷ This statement—seemingly an aside—argues that the greatness of Black women derives not from their exceptional notoriety but from their everyday piety. Lyons introduced this idea in other sketches as well, including that of Agnes Adams. The narrator notes that “good women” like Adams are “in daily evidence,” to be found “among us [in] countless numbers.”⁸⁸ Lyons thus suggested that, among Black women, virtue is common, typical, expected.

By blurring the lines between the exceptional and the everyday, these sketches challenge assumptions about which lives deserve to be remembered and celebrated. The collection also implicitly argues for expanding the group of Black women to whom subsequent generations should be grateful. This argument appears both in Brown’s introductory framing of the volume as a “token of appreciation” and in individual sketches including expressions of gratitude.⁸⁹ The collection instructs audiences in a capacious practice of gratitude for all Black women’s lives. In so doing, the authors of the sketches actively theorized both historical significance and exemplarity for Black American women.

A third theme that shapes this collection is the idea that Black women exhibited excellence in their work and that this excellence is represented as a source of joy for them, for those they encountered, and for Black readers. In reflecting on all varieties of Black women’s excellence, the sketches invite shared expressions of joy and gratitude. The lives of these Black women were undoubtedly marked by “the toils, vigils and prayers of the many whose lives have been lived in shade,” yet this collection also recognizes the joyful aspects of their work.⁹⁰ The idea of work—especially on behalf of one’s beloved community—as joyful is evident in two verses included in the collection: one by Sarah G. Jones as an epigraph and the other by Susie Lankford Shorter. Both poems were used by the Ohio Federation of Women’s Clubs. As Jones wrote in her “Ode to Women,” “The ‘Joy of Service,’ Page 122 →her fond heart endures / From infancy, through many years / Of development; mingled with faith, hope and trust, / She builds to the great, the good and the just, / That the Future may fairly decide.”⁹¹ Such service may include difficult work to be “endured,” but Jones suggested that the “joy” came from the way in which one’s work was oriented toward the “great, the good and the just.” In similar fashion, Shorter’s poem—which, when sung to the tune of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” became the Ohio Federation Song—presents Black women’s obligation to uplift as a source of deep joy: “We must give our time and talent—/ and the hungry must be fed, / We must root up sin and sadness, / planting good and joy instead, / Our motto, ‘Deeds not words.’”⁹² These poets issued a call to Black women not to lives of subservient drudgery and toil but toward the self-conscious choice to serve their communities and thereby create a source of lasting joy for other Black women. Such celebration of women’s service operates comfortably within the boundaries of respectable womanhood while reframing Black womanhood as a public identity. The lyrics thus encourage female readers to take action and invest in their Black communities.

The sketches in Homespun Heroines cultivate feelings of joy and gratitude by narrating how Black women enjoyed their own lives while also bringing pleasure to those around them and providing a source of delight for future readers.⁹³ Randall Burkett observed that the women profiled in this collection were “extraordinarily talented” and that most used their talents in multiple fields.⁹⁴ To capture the range of excellence, therefore, this final section focuses on Black women’s achievements in four broad categories: as performers, teachers, artists and craftswomen, and community figures.

The enjoyment of writing and reading about the achievements of Black women comes across clearly in M. M. Marshall’s sketch of singer and music teacher Madam Emma Azalia Hackley. At six pages, it is one of the longer sketches. The author communicated her admiration for Hackley even in the subtitle, which reads, “Mme. E. Azalia Hackley, Singer, Musician, Humanitarian; a Woman who has made her Life a Masterpiece.”⁹⁵ The use of such language suggests that Marshall presented Hackley as worthy of admiration in part because her life itself was a kind of work of art, a thing of beauty. Along the same lines, the word “love” appears frequently—twelve times—in the sketch, in most cases either professing Hackley’s love for her work and her race or people’s love for Hackley. The narrator tells us that, even before birth, Hackley’s mother bequeathed to her daughter a “love of music and faith in the Negro’s voice as a medium and power for good,” as Page 123 →well as a “love of duty” and “love of service.”⁹⁶ In her adulthood, the narrator explains, Hackley was presented with the “tantalizing temptation” to pass for White, yet this “loyal race woman” firmly rejected this temptation. The narrator immediately frames this example as a sound justification for admiration, saying “This is one reason why we loved her.” The sketch continues, “She loved her race, and has proven it, time and again.”⁹⁷ Hackley’s love for her race also expressed itself specifically in her love of “Negro folk songs,” the appreciation and teaching of which she made the focus of her later career. According to the narrator, Hackley was “a pioneer teaching the masses to love their folk songs.”⁹⁸ The sketch claims that her commitment to this educational vision also brought her enjoyment: “She was so dead in earnest about musical social uplift that sacrifices and total self-effacement were a pleasure to her.”⁹⁹ Throughout this sketch, Marshall characterized her subject as a person who derived great joy from her work, and her mode of representing Hackley also communicates that remembering her life can bring joy, as can the appreciation of a beautiful musical performance.

As perhaps the most common (and often only) professional pursuit for educated women during this time, teaching became an important source of joy both for women engaged in it and for women remembering these inspiring instructors. Burkett observed that one-third of the women profiled were identified as teachers.¹⁰⁰ Two separate profiles illustrate how remembering the work of great teachers can be enjoyable and encouraging. At ten and eleven pages, respectively, the profiles of Victoria Earle Matthews and Maria Louise Baldwin are two of the longest sketches in the collection. Frances Keyser’s profile of Matthews, for instance, recalls her own visits to the “little mission rooms” where Matthews taught, saying “it was a joy and an inspiration to see the enthusiasm with which this attractive young woman . . . gave herself to the work of teaching these neglected little ones.”¹⁰¹ Her firsthand observation further enabled her to describe the “pleasing picture” of Matthews “surrounded by these little ones, each clamoring for a place next to her.”¹⁰² Keyser’s account throughout the sketch draws attention to her own eyewitness position, first during her visits to Matthews’s schools then in her position as the assistant superintendent of Matthews’s White Rose Home.¹⁰³

In a similar fashion, Brown’s sketch of Baldwin utilizes the tributes of parents and colleagues to provide firsthand accounts of this woman’s remarkable career as a teacher. For much of her career, Baldwin served as a teacher, principal, and finally “master” of the Agassiz School in Cambridge, Page 124 →Massachusetts, which was populated by five hundred students, mostly White.¹⁰⁴ Baldwin died suddenly, leaving the school community bereft. The tributes quoted by Brown demonstrated that Baldwin occupied a treasured place in the hearts of her students, their parents, and her colleagues. Both the tributes and the sketch itself repeatedly use words such as “gratitude,” “debt,” and “appreciation” to capture community members’ feelings toward Baldwin.¹⁰⁵ Like Brown’s other sketches, this one uses carefully selected language (even that of others) to evoke feelings of gratitude as readers learn about another remarkable and yet familiar woman of their race.

The sketch of Baldwin also illustrates how authors crafted layered, textured meditations on Black female excellence rather than rosy paeans. For instance, one tribute shares a poignant story that illustrates what the anonymous author described as Baldwin’s “deep feeling” and “her sensitiveness to the wrong done to those to whom she belonged and loved.”¹⁰⁶ The author explained that it occurred when the film The Birth of a Nation premiered in Boston, presumably sometime between its 1915 release and Baldwin’s death in 1922. The author explained that Baldwin felt that the screening was “an insult . . . to the race itself.”¹⁰⁷ The narrator of the original anecdote (presumably White) reported that they had gathered “some of the colored race” to express goodwill toward them during that trying time, and the author asked them to “read from Paul Dunbar’s poems” and “sing ‘My Country, ’Tis of Thee.’” Baldwin declined, saying, “Please do not sing that then for it would break my heart when I know of the feeling of so many in Boston and throughout the country, who do not recognize truly the fact that this is our country. I might sing it another time, but not now.”¹⁰⁸ This anecdote is striking and significant in its ability to represent Baldwin as a multidimensional human being who experienced both moments of “high idealism” and “depression.”¹⁰⁹ By including these many tributes, Brown insisted on remembering Baldwin in the fullness of her humanity as a Black woman—a revolutionary choice for this moment, yet one also aligned with practices of Black women’s memory work.

In addition to achieving excellence in specialized fields and success in teaching, the Black women profiled in this collection were gifted craftswomen. The most affecting story illustrating this area of expertise appears in the profile of Mrs. Jane Roberts, wife of Joseph Jenkins Roberts, the “first African President of Liberia.”¹¹⁰ Although the profile is ostensibly focused on Jane Roberts, a quarter of the text is devoted to a story about Martha Ann Ricks. The sketch notes that Mrs. Roberts met Queen Victoria twice: once with her husband and a second time when accompanying Liberian Page 125 →citizen Ricks. The narrator explains that Ricks, who was “famous for her patch work quilts,”¹¹¹ had been working on a quilt for the Queen for 25 years.¹¹² Although others laughed at her insistence that she would present the finished product to the Queen, “Mrs. Roberts saw and admired the quilt, heard the story and the way was found.”¹¹³ According to this account, Mrs. Roberts was captured not only by the fine handiwork but also by Ricks’s determination and confidence in her abilities, as evinced in her “story.” The sketch includes a vividly detailed description of the quilt to illustrate and emphasize Ricks’s skill: It “showed a complete coffee tree all in green and yellow on white ground—its branches and leaves perfectly formed, the flowers at the root of the leaves and its berries—exquisite in traces and workmanship.”¹¹⁴ This concise yet rich imagery supplies a prime example of what Aristotle described as “bringing before the eyes,” a rhetorical technique with which sketch author Brown would have been well acquainted. The sketch then continues by imagining the emotional outcome of the trip to England: “On reaching London a meeting was arranged and Aunt Martha stood in a palace and had the joy, after years of patience and perseverance, to present in person her quilt which was graciously accepted by that noblest of sovereigns, the Queen of Great Britain and Empress of all India, Victoria Regina.”¹¹⁵ By explaining that Ricks had “stood in a palace,” presented the quilt “in person,” and had the opportunity to have her quilt “graciously accepted” by this respected ruler, the passage demonstrates that the Queen welcomed Ricks—a formerly enslaved Black woman—as an embodied person into her home. Using the Queen’s official title underscores the dignity and significance of the situation. As if anticipating the objections to this fanciful scene, Brown offered readers evidence of the event, saying, “Today the workmanship of this humble African woman adorns a niche in the art collections of Windsor Castle.”¹¹⁶ This story of Martha Ricks elevates the skilled handiwork practiced by many Black women, presenting it as a source of joy and pride for intimates and sovereigns alike.

Finally, sketches in this collection highlight the individual, everyday excellence enacted by community figures. These individuals did not exhibit achievements that the White patriarchal society would accept as notable. Rather, they exhibited virtuous behavior oriented toward their communities. Sketches of such women provide further evidence of the blurred line between extraordinary and ordinary women throughout the collection. Although this can be seen in several sketches about the lives of respected community members such as “Granny Gross,” “Grandma Pyles,” and “Aunt Mac,” I focus on the sketch of Hannah MacDonald (“Aunt Mac”), as it Page 126 →provides the best illustration of the approach.¹¹⁷ Moreover, the account exemplifies Hallie Quinn Brown’s signature rhetorical style—rich description, vivid imagery, and a sentimental tone. Brown divided this narrative into three “chapters”: The first focuses on childhood and young adulthood, the second describes her time in Wilberforce, and the third relates the days after Aunt Mac’s death. Like many other sketches, this one begins by describing the hardships faced by the subject as a child. Young Hannah Morris had moved from Virginia to Kentucky with her family. Her parents died when she was still young, and the children’s care and inheritance were not executed fairly. Having been deprived of an education and “defrauded of thirty thousand dollars,” the children were “thrown upon their own responsibilities.”¹¹⁸ Even in the midst of these difficulties, the narrator insists that “each attained honorable manhood and womanhood.”¹¹⁹ Hannah married in 1833 but was widowed after only seven years. At that point, Hannah went to live with her sister in Cincinnati and finally in Wilberforce, Ohio.¹²⁰

The second chapter begins with a lush description: “We find ourselves standing in a large grove where tall symmetrical trees nod and wave to each passing breeze. Nicely-kept paths intersect each other, winding here and there and leading to the neat cottages that stand in orderly rows on either side of the campus.”¹²¹ At the end of her description, the narrator declares, “What an enchanted spot is this!”¹²² Then, directly engaging with the reader, she asks, “Can you not recognize the place, dear friend? Ah! yes, you say, ’tis the name so dear to many, the oft-repeated name of Wilberforce.”¹²³ In 1856, Wilberforce, Ohio, became the site of Wilberforce University, the first historically Black college owned and operated by Black Americans. By inviting readers to imagine or recall this place, the passage locates them within a rich site of African-American memory. The core of the sketch then focuses on Aunt Mac, who was so closely associated with that place in the community’s memory. These two central paragraphs describe Hannah Mac-Donald’s place within the community as “everybody’s Aunt Mac.”¹²⁴ Brown used her characteristic homespun metaphors and sentimental language to evoke the feelings that this woman fostered in her community. The following passage illustrates Brown’s choices: “All the little ones for miles around knew and loved her. She had a kind word for Willie and a caress for Jennie, and when in the height of their childish sports her laugh would ring out and mingle with theirs in innocent glee. And such a laugh! I wish you might have heard it! It was like the rippling of some happy stream, so cheery its sound and so full of hearty good will. She was the very providence, too, of the whole neighborhood.”¹²⁵ Specific names such as Willie and Jennie Page 127 →ground the description, and direct address invites readers further into Brown’s recollection. As if anticipating reader objections that this person is too good to be true, Brown concluded the “chapter” by saying, “This, dear reader, is no fiction, but a glimpse only of one of the most beautiful, Christian characters that was ever perfected for immortality.”¹²⁶ The lofty, sentimental phrasing brings Aunt Mac—an “ordinary” woman—into the orbit of immortality.¹²⁷ Although the language strongly implies that the sketch was based on an eyewitness account, nowhere did Brown explicitly draw attention to her source of information.

The final chapter describes the community’s mourning after their beloved Aunt Mac’s death. Brown yielded to high melodrama in these final paragraphs, concluding with the declaration that the community will “miss her forever” yet can take comfort in being able to “set up a tablet in the heart” with a loving inscription to the “sacred” memory of Aunt Mac.¹²⁸ Although a similar account by a White author might evoke images of the “mammy,” Brown’s narrative conveys a sense of deep love and respect that dignifies rather than diminishes its subject. By firmly grounding Aunt Mac’s story in the place of Wilberforce, Brown revealed the magnitude of a life that brought joy and encouragement to Black communities. Aunt Mac is connected to no major figures, no historical events or social movements, but her memory is embedded in and shapes a community that celebrates Black love and Black excellence.

Homespun Heroines is both a representative and an exemplary instance of the unique genre of women’s collective biography. It is also a unique case for advancing the study of Black women’s community memory work in the 1920s—a time when the New Negro Movement celebrated African-American arts and literature and the Nineteenth Amendment opened new opportunities for women. Often an afterthought in advancements of “the race” as well as “their sex,” Black women in the interwar period needed more than ever to create commemorative space for their intersectional identities. To understand how Black women created such space, we must look past the formidable memorials and monuments to the humbler “homespun” memories that Black women produced for their own communities.

A collection of such diverse lives invites myriad feelings, from despair to delight. In this chapter, I focused on the feelings of gratitude and joy, specifically, to demonstrate how Black women used the common, even mundane, rhetorical form of the multibiography to uplift their Page 128 →communities while also acknowledging their shared struggles. Initially, it might appear that highlighting positive feelings like gratitude and joy constitutes a Pollyanna-ish approach to traumatic experiences such as enslavement and racial discrimination. However, as scholars such as Ahad-Legardy, Brock, and others argue, it can be misleading and even detrimental for storytellers and scholars to focus exclusively on trauma when considering the history of Black Americans. Referring to the pronounced ambivalence about Southern Blackness, Stewart observes, “In our haste to rid the public sphere of southern Black joy, we miss the danger in confining our stories to racial sorrow.”¹²⁹

Focusing on the positive communal feelings invited by this collection yields several important insights about Black American women’s community memory work. First, it shows how these Black women writers marshaled their rhetorical skills to acknowledge both the deep pain and the great joy in the lives of their foremothers. They thereby rejected simplistic accounts of Black lives as either doomed to despair or blissfully free of suffering. This is important not only as a historical claim about rhetorical activity of the period but also because it attests to the long history that grounds contemporary efforts to honor Black joy. Second, examining this collection’s evocation of gratitude and joy supplies evidence of the rhetorical skill and savvy of Black women in the face of numerous constraints, including the politics of respectability. The politics of respectability, according to historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham “emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations.”¹³⁰ As Higginbotham and other scholars have noted, the discourse of respectability enabled middle-class Black women of the period to enact traditional feminine morals while also advancing more radical forms of protest. Celebrating and expressing gratitude for the lives of virtuous Black women would have been, at the time, an acceptable activity for upstanding African-American women. Yet doing so also provided these authors and their audiences the space to preserve their own memories and to build a supply of stories from which they could build powerful critiques of White public memories, if they later chose to do so. Third, foregrounding gratitude reveals the rhetorical power of feelings to connect women of different time periods. Exhorting readers to feel gratitude toward their foremothers can seem like an empty piety, but in this instance, it cultivates a sense of historical continuity for women of a race purported to have no history. This expression of gratitude Page 129 →also participates in the Black cultural practice of ancestor acknowledgment, as described by Temple.¹³¹ Just as Black women speakers acknowledged exemplary women, the creators of Homespun Heroines gave thanks for lives that continued to inspire. Finally, attending to joy, as Brown put it in the introduction, both in the writing and in the reading of these lives shows how this volume may have served to develop affiliative resources among contemporaries, which, in turn, would enable them to act politically on behalf of their communities. In Homespun Heroines, we see the joy of community memory work.