Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century. Nazera Sadiq Wright

From 1886-87, Gertrude Bustill Mossell wrote an advice column in the New York Freeman (1884-87), an influential black newspaper with wide distribution. Mossell asserts that, if properly trained, girls can fend for themselves in any situation. “Just tell him in plain English to keep his ‘hands off’” (qtd. in Wright 109), she writes, further advising mothers to “instill in their [daughters’] very nature that they are safer in their own hands than they are in the hands of any man—preachers not excepted.” Nazera Sadiq Wright highlights Mossell’s advice as “a quietly radical bombshell that had many layers of meaning for the girl who read her words right” (110). As this example demonstrates, Wright’s Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century provides detailed examinations of recovered texts, offering nuanced close readings that are also thoroughly grounded in relevant scholarship. The book recovers attention to black girlhood during a century when the notion that young black women had access to girlhood was contested by systemic racism. Offering practical advice to aid black girls’ growth into self-sufficient and confident women, Mossell’s voice empowers. Wright’s archival research recovers representations of black girlhood, including, in many cases, the previously neglected voices of nineteenth-century black women writers. Wright’s book breaks new ground in the fields of United States women writers, United States children’s literature, African American literature, and nineteenth-century black print cultures. Building on scholarship from Donnarae MacCann’s White Supremacy in Children’s Literature: Characterizations of African Americans, 1830-1900 (1998) to Paula T. Connolly’s Slavery in American Children’s Literature, 1790-2010 (2013), the book explores new avenues for research on race and children’s literature while provocatively extending key concepts raised in Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011) by offering a more concentrated look at the specifics of black girlhood in the long nineteenth-century United States.

Art history · Girl · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · White (mutation) · Wright · American Literature and Culture · Gender Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Themes in Literature Analysis