By Jonathan Ogebe ~
Anna Julia Cooper was a Black educator and sociologist whose works contributed to Black feminism and the intersections of race, class, and gender. She was born on August 10, 1858 in Raleigh, North Carolina to Hannah Stanley (who was enslaved) and Fabius Haywood, who historical records suggest was Hannah’s slave owner. She went to high school at St. Augustine, where she first experienced sexism within the school, as she was discouraged from learning Greek and Latin while her male classmates were actively encouraged and supported in learning these subjects as a path towards going into ministry. Despite this, Cooper was successful in petitioning to take these classes at St. Augustine, and after graduating, she was accepted to Oberlin College, a liberal arts institution, enrolling in the B.A. program (designed at that time specifically for men) instead of the “Ladies Coursework” designed to be less rigorous and focused towards vocational skills. After graduating Oberlin in 1884, Cooper went into the teaching profession, where she focused on improving the education of Black students. It was from her teaching after graduating that led to Oberlin granting her an M.A. in Mathematics in 1887. Throughout college and her career as an educator, she pushed back against a host of different issues relating to the Black community including racism within education, within the Christian church in America, and sexism faced by women within the Black community. She not only fought against these ideas, but she also published her thoughts about them in books and essays throughout her life. Her most famous work, A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South, discussed and challenged these issues in detail and was widely praised for its analysis and conclusions when it was published in 1892.[1]
Anna Julia Cooper’s work, A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South (shortened to Voice in this post) is widely considered to be her most famous work due to its role in establishing Black feminism and adding to the field of sociology through the theories that she proposed about the condition of Black people (specifically Black women) in the United States, and in the South. According to the book Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction by Vivian M. May, Anna Julia’s works contain eleven themes that are considered core ideas within the field of Black feminism. They are listed as follows: “Redefining what ‘counts’ as a feminist/women’s or a civil rights/race issue by starting from the premise that race is gendered and gender is raced, and that both are shot through with the politics of class, sexuality, and nation”, “Arguing for ‘both/and’ thinking alongside sustained critiques of ‘either/or’ dualisms to show how false dichotomies (mind/body, self/other, reason/emotion, philosophy/politics, fact/value, science/society, metropole/colony, subject/object) have served to justify domination and reinforce hierarchy”, “Naming multiple domains of power and showing how they interrelate (these include economic or material, ideological, philosophical, emotional or psychological, physical, and institutional sites of power)”, “Advocating a multi-axis or intersectional approach to liberation politics because domination is multiform and because different forms of oppression are simultaneous in nature”, “Challenging hierarchical, top-down forms of knowing, leading, learning, organizing, and ‘helping’ in favor of participatory, embodied, reflexive models”, “Rejecting dehumanizing discourses, deficit models, biologistic/determinist paradigms, and pathologizing approaches to culture or to individuals”, “Crafting a critical interdisciplinary method that crosses boundaries of knowledge, history, identity, and nation to reveal how these constructed divisions marginalize those whose lives and ways of knowing straddle borders and modeling discursive/analytic techniques that are flexible, kinetic, comparative, multivocal, and plurisignant”, “Using counter-memory and other insurgent methods to work against sanctioned ignorance and to make visible the ‘undersides’ of history as well as the shadows or margins of subjectivity”, “Stipulating as the precondition to systemic change the rejection of internalized oppression alongside the development of a transformed self and critical consciousness”, “Arguing for the inherent philosophical relevance of and political need for theorizing from lived experience”, and “Conceptualizing the self as inherently connected to others, and therefore arguing for an ethic of reciprocity and collective accountability” (May, 182-187).[2]
Anna Julia Cooper, 1858-1964.
In Voice, Anna Julia Cooper employs these ideas characteristic of Black feminism to argue her central claim that women are necessary for civilizations to progress, and thus Black women are necessary to improve the conditions of Black people in the United States. She argues this point throughout Voice by challenging racist and sexist theories dominant in the late 19th century. She begins by setting a historical framework for the treatment of women, then links the previous treatment of women to the 19th century treatment of women in the first section of Voice titled “Womanhood A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race”. She does this by claiming that the current (19th century) view of women stemmed from feudalism and Christianity. She elaborates on this by describing the role of women in feudalist Europe. In the eyes of men, they were objects of desire, people to be praised and valued for their beauty, and for the possibility of having children, but nothing else. She says of this time, “Respect for woman, the much lauded chivalry of the Middle Ages, meant what I fear it still means to some men in our own day – respect for the elect few among whom they expect to consort” (Cooper, 14).[3] She also cites examples of different civilizations throughout the world, weighing their accomplishments with their negative practices, and comparing their progress to the societal status of women in each of the civilizations. The historical framework she builds leads to her main point in “Womanhood” – “the position of woman in society determines the vital elements of its regeneration and progress” (Cooper, 21).[4] Cooper substantiates this claim by stating, “because it is she who must first form the man by directing the earliest impulses of his character” (Cooper, 21).[5] She then links the importance of women to the progress of society to the Black community: “Now the fundamental agency under God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and the start of its progress upward, must be the black woman” (Cooper, 28).[6]
Throughout Voice, Cooper also discusses intersections of religion and race by interweaving the teachings of Christianity to support her arguments of liberation for the Black community in the U.S. Specifically in “Womanhood”, she introduces these ideas to her audience, saying
throughout his [Jesus’] life and in his death, he has given to men a rule and guide for the estimation of woman as an equal, as a helper, as a friend, and as a sacred charge to be sheltered and cared for with a brother’s love and sympathy, lessons which nineteen centuries’ gigantic strides in knowledge, arts, and sciences, in social and ethical principles have not been able to probe to their depth or to exhaust in practice. (Cooper, 18)[7]
She later uses the egalitarian ideas taken from the Bible to criticize white, Christian southerners in their racist treatment of Black believers.
The religious argument that she makes in “Womanhood”, critiquing the treatment of women by the church and exposing the hypocrisy of white, male Christians, extends to another section in Voice titled “The Higher Education of Women”. In this section, she adds a moral subpoint to her overarching religious argument, commenting on the descent from teachings during the days of Jesus to “barbarian brawn and brutality in the fifth century” that, “Whence came this apotheosis of greed and cruelty…As if the possession of Christian graces of meekness, nonresistance and forgiveness, were incompatible with the civilization professedly based on Christianity, the religion of love” (Cooper, 73).[8] She later goes on to argue that women add a perspective that is needed in many academic and spiritual areas, saying “Religion, science, art, economics, have all needed the feminine flavor; and literature, the expression of what is permanent and best in all of these, may be gauged at any time to measure the strength of the feminine ingredient” (Cooper, 76).[9] Later she explains that the nurturing qualities of women are needed, stating, “homes for inebriates and homes for lunatics, shelter for the aged and shelter for babes, hospitals for the sick, props and braces for the falling, reformatory prisons and prison reformatories, all show that a ‘mothering’ influence from some source is leavening the nation” (Cooper, 77).[10]
Putting the importance of women into context with men, Cooper emphasizes that the feminine traits are not exclusive to women, but that men may possess them also, and that “there is a feminine side as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related not as inferior or superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger, but as complements – complements in one necessary and symmetric whole” (Cooper, 78).[11]
She also addresses the importance of higher education for women by expanding on the societal treatment of women that she addressed in “Womanhood”. She says, “I grant you that intellectual development, with the livelihood and self-reliance which it gives, renders woman less dependent on the marriage for physical support…Her horizon is extended” (Cooper, 82).[12] Essentially, Cooper is saying that the education of women frees them from the expectations that society has already placed on them, and this coincides with the liberation themes explained by May.
After completing A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South, Cooper spent time publishing several other works, all the while managing her activism, career, and later her maternal responsibilities of two adopted children and her brother’s five children. In 1914, she started her PhD at Columbia University, but had to stop schooling because her thesis was rejected. Persevering, 11 years later in 1925, Cooper was able to transfer her PhD credits from Columbia and earn her PhD at the University of Paris in History. Her thesis, titled The Attitude of France on the Question of Slavery Between 1789 and 1848, examined the conditions leading to the revolutions in Haiti. After this, she continued to teach until she retired from teaching in 1930 and lived another 34 years, dying on February 27, 1964 at the age of 105.[13]
Overall, Cooper’s A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South argues for the advancement of Black women to see an advancement for the Black community at large, and today, many of the points made and the conclusions Cooper came to are valued for their clarity. However, at the time this work was published, for many years afterwards, and recently, Cooper’s contributions to sociology through her Black feminist ideas were overlooked in African-American studies. This was due to academic opportunities being offered primarily to men, and exposure of philosophical ideas benefitting and supporting men over women during this time. May writes,
Figures such as W.E.B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke are readily cited for their forethought and innovation, while Cooper’s work, for example, is rarely pointed to, much less acknowledged in a substantial way…But of course, the very fact of their visibility was (and is) due in part to their masculinity. At the same time that they were instrumental advocates of the work of many African American women, they also gained greater access to and accrued more power in the public domain as men. (May 173-174)[14]
The effects of bias against Black feminist ideas within literature continues currently. May writes,
Unfortunately, many of our prevailing conceptual models remain both constrained and inflexible. It seems that dominant perceptual screens are so tenacious, so resistant to shifting or bending, that Cooper’s roles has a philosopher, an activist, a civil rights leader, and a feminist continue to be routinely diminished or studiously ignored. (May 173)[15]
By focusing on the contributions of Black women such as Anna Julia Cooper to social science fields, hopefully the historical bias against Cooper’s powerful ideas can be reversed and her accomplishments celebrated.
About the author:
Jonathan Ogebe is a second year student at the University of Chicago majoring in Chemistry and minoring in Inequality, Social Problems, and Change. He is involved in many organizations on campus, including Benzene (the chemistry society on campus), Students for Disability Justice, and Active Minds, a mental health advocacy group on campus. After he graduates from the College, he plans to attend graduate school with the goal of becoming a drug researcher. He also hopes to participate in advocacy to improve the conditions of historically oppressed groups nationwide and worldwide.
References:
Featured Image: Dr. Anna Cooper in parlor of 201 T Street, N.W., then the Registrar’s Office of Frelinghuysen University. Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
[1] Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2007.
[2] Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2007.
[3] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[4] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[5] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[6] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[7] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[8] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[9] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[10] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[11] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[12] Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
[13] Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2007.
[14] Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2007.
[15] Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2007.
Bibliography:
Anna Julia Cooper. The Voice of Anna Julia Cooper: Including A Voice from the South and Other Important Essays, Papers, and Letters. Edited by Charles Lemert and Esme Bhan, Rowan & Littlefield, 1998.
Pinko1977. Anna J. Cooper 1892.Jpg. Edited by JDavid, 1892, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_J._Cooper_1892.jpg.
Scurlock Studio Records. Dr. Anna Cooper in Parlor of 201 T Street, N.W., Then the Registrar’s Office of Frelinghuysen University [from Group of Negatives Entitled “Dr. Anna J. Cooper in Her Garden, Home & Patio” : Photonegative]. 1930s, https://sova.si.edu/details/NMAH.AC.0618.S04.01?s=0&n=12&t=D&q=Cooper%2C+Anna+J.+%28Anna+Julia%29%2C+1858-1964&i=1#ref523. National Museum of American History.
Vivian M. May. Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2007.