In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (1993), Susan Bordo focuses on the continuing cultural reproduction of masculinism in public institutions, which reduces women to their bodies, whose depictions in Western philosophy are generally negative: “[t]he body as [an] animal, as appetite, as [a] deceiver, as [a] prison of the soul and confounder of its projects.”50 In The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction (1987), anthropologist Emily Martin demonstrates how women’s bodies have been treated as “mechanical factories or centralized production systems” in medical texts.51 These works examine how Western society has stigmatized and politicized the female body.
This research contributes to body studies and pursues the interrelationship between the individual female body and the body politic by zeroing in on body parts (or organs) as the source of racialized and gendered resistance. Each chapter in this study addresses the redefinition of a female body part because, as suggested earlier, the body of black women has historically been divided, stigmatized, and assessed in terms of its parts. The parts of the body examined in this book include black women’s hair, vocal cords, wombs, and torsos (the naked body), all of which were devalued, dishonored, and made dysfunctional by slave traders and slave owners. Although some body parts may appear insignificant in a metaphysical body politic, these parts nevertheless reshaped African American women’s self-image and renewed their views of American society. As breadwinners, consumers, ←9 | 10→artists, and creators, as well as full citizens of capitalist America, they altered the public perception of the black female body by redefining its parts. Their corporeal activism began with individual body parts and proceeded to address the whole body. Although they adeptly avoided confrontation with patriarchy, they articulated, advocated, and embodied antiracist, feminist stands and challenged white cultural norms.
Through the analytical and interpretive reading of texts and images, Bodies That Work investigates African American women’s corporeal activism during the Progressive Era (the 1890s to the 1920s) and beyond. The book blends an application of archival and interpretive approaches to various kinds of materials, such as personal notes, letters, artwork, movies, stage productions, articles in periodicals, advertisements, and related textual and contextual documents. These records and writings, including exchanges between the women and their correspondents, promise to shed light on women’s politicized bodies at the macro and micro levels.
Chapter 1 examines the work of Sarah Breedlove Walker, better known as Madam C. J. Walker, as seen in her advertisements, letters, newspaper articles, and beauty schools’ student manual. Walker transformed black women’s stigmatized hair into a source of pride and a locus of resistance by devising a formula, or a grammar of beauty culture, to empower black women in the United States and abroad. This chapter focuses on Walker’s hair culture and cultural work, which helped black women embrace their bodies and improve their quality of life. The chapter unveils how Walker’s grammar of beauty culture was formed, spread among women across the United States and beyond, and became a means of confronting and surviving racism in progressive America.
Chapter 2 focuses on E. Azalia Hackley’s musical mobilization to find out why and how she inspired black Americans by employing the vocal organ. Hackley, often called “Madame Hackley,” was an African American soprano singer and vocal trainer who studied classical Western singing in Paris and London. She is better known to literary critics and historians as the author of a book of manners for black girls, The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916). However, despite her image as a representative of establishment values, Hackley was in fact a grassroots social activist who toured during most of her professional years, inspiring thousands of people through her vocal cords and organizing large musical events throughout the nation. Without belonging to any organization, she provided fertile ground for African American musical geniuses, such as Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes, to earn fame. This chapter is first concerned with the meaning of spirituals—songs she helped revive among African Americans—sung at the community recitals she directed in churches and schools throughout the country. The ←10 | 11→chapter then explores the impact of her seemingly apolitical missionary work on progressive African Americans living under the Black Codes (commonly referred to as “Jim Crow” laws), a revised version of the Slave Codes.
Chapter 3 analyzes African American sculptor Meta Warrick Fuller’s redefinition of the black woman’s womb in her mother–child sculpture, In Memory of Mary Turner: A Silent Protest Against Mob Violence. Mary Turner was an African American woman who was brutally lynched by a mob that mutilated her womb, removed and crushed her fetus, and burned her alive. The incident gave Fuller the impetus to create a permanent expression of her opposition to the inhumanity of mob violence. This chapter describes how the incident represented white patriarchal dominance over black women’s wombs during and after slavery and explores how Fuller’s statue addressed racial and gender prejudices and demanded African American women’s reproductive autonomy in progressive America.
Finally, Chapter 4 discusses how the nudity (the bare-breasted torso) of Josephine Baker, an African American performer based in Paris, confronted white racist images in the 1920s and 1930s. After leading a life of quasi-slavery in the United States, Baker sailed to France in 1925, settled in Paris, capitalized on French primitivism, and successfully entered the French body politic. Her manipulation of opposing images—savagery and civility—allowed her to blur her racial origin, join the French social elite, and rise above controversies over French colonialism. This chapter examines the hidden cultural implications of her female nudity on both sides of the Atlantic by interpreting her nude body as a performance costume. It then explores how Baker’s self-chosen nudity created a counter-narrative to American racism and changed the stereotyped image of the black woman.
My study focuses on women’s working, money-making bodies and body parts because I view economic strength as an underlying motivator for these women’s transformative work. Their financial independence empowered them to address racism because, as economic historian Karl Polanyi notes in The Great Transformation, “man’s economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships.”52 “Instead of economy being embedded in social relations,” says Polanyi, “social relations are embedded in the economic system.”53 Despite, or perhaps thanks to, the double prejudices of race and gender hindering African American women’s participation in the mainstream economy, they were more active in pursuing entrepreneurial, independent careers than their male counterparts. While many African American men were involved in agricultural work, black women “developed entrepreneurial niches” in dressmaking, hair care, and other personal services, such as boarding houses, restaurants, midwifery, and education, in the early twentieth century.54 The four women in this book also ventured into new ←11 | 12→professions that enabled them to make a breakthrough into the veritable body politic. Their pioneering work gained (inter)national recognition because their bodies created something new, unique, or otherwise valuable to people at the time. As I explain in the following chapters, these women’s revisions of female body parts through professional work were shared among African American women and altered their appearance, behavior, demeanor, visions, and goals, helping them to rise out of lives of oppression and submission.
Notes
1. John David Smith, introduction to My Bondage and My Freedom, by Frederick Douglass (1855; repr., New York: Penguin, 2003), xix; Rayford W. Logan, introduction to The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, ed. Rayford W. Logan (1892; repr., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), v–xii; Yuval Taylor, introduction to I Was Born a Slave, vol. 1 (1772–1849), ed. Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence
