However, researchers wonder, write about, and ask publicly: what about the women who also led, fought, organized, theorized, and wrote about abolition, freedom, equality, and nation building?<\/p>\n
Grace Sanders Johnson and Takkara K. Brunson have offered a blueprint in two new books, White Gloves, Black Nation: Women, Citizenship,<\/em> and Political Wayfaring in Haiti<\/em> and Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba.<\/em> Both authors pointedly list the names of women understudied, lesser-studied, and unstudied from global Black history. These scholars engage multilingual archives in Haitian Krey\u00f2l\/Creole, French, and Spanish, tracing Haitian and Black Cuban women\u2019s feminist philosophies and acts. Together their works explore the origins, complexities, and practices of Haitian and Cuban feminism across many decades. Their research spans the periods of abolition, independence, post-independence, US imperialism, the republican era, Communist and Marxist activities, and authoritarian regimes.<\/p>\n While there are many overlaps and shared excellences in these books, I especially value their robust feminist frameworks. Sanders Johnson and Brunson position Haitian women and African-descended Cuban women as the storytellers, theorists, and archivists of their past. Sanders Johnson \u201capproach[es] these women and their words as trusted historical interlocutors,\u201d while Brunson argues, \u201cI use their stories to think more broadly about the varied social experiences of Cuban women of African descent.\u201d<\/p>\n Both books matter in meaningful ways. Methodologically, they teach you how to locate women; analytically, they use the women\u2019s words and actions to understand female gender in patriarchal societies, as well as the long-standing historical contributions of these women to Haiti and Cuba.<\/p>\n Scholars and artists who use repositories, archives, and libraries across the global Black diaspora are familiar with the paucity of sources for, about, and by women. In these repositories, a complex silence hovers over the lives of African-descended women.1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n They are simultaneously present and not present. For examples, diary entries; notes; photographs; bills of sales; legislation; and racist, sexist unscientific data, mark Black women\u2019s presence. The same sources that record their visibilities render them invisible. In such archival spaces, Black women appear as objects of slave, colonial, and imperial empire. They are also appendages to men as mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters. Some are recorded with no names, first names only, their husband\u2019s surnames, or descriptions of their trades as market women, domestics, washerwomen, or tobacco workers.<\/p>\n In White Gloves, Black Nation, <\/em>Dr. Sanders Johnson expands the notion of archive, mining through sources that include \u201cparenthetical notes, mentions of melancholy, undeveloped photos, and addendums,\u201d and Haitian women\u2019s memories. She conducted over 40 interviews and places them alongside Haitian women\u2019s self-published feminist essays, photographs, legislation, and the intimate letters exchanged between some.<\/p>\n\n We learn of elite women, by name, who had access to education, intellectual networks, and travel. Sanders Johnson also centers the names and stories of women who are unnamed or appear in the archives as Adelsia or Amise, the actual domestic caretakers, market women, and femmes du peuple<\/em> (women of the people). She argues compellingly that these seemingly disparate groups of women actually occupied and shared spaces as laborers. Whether they wore white gloves to host caf\u00e9 and tea parties and manage Haiti\u2019s public health programs, or whether they worked the land and markets, all of them as Haitian women (fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em>) labored as mothers, wives, caretakers, attorneys, agriculturalists, domestics, students, anthropologists, social workers, and writers.<\/p>\n Even though class boundaries separate these women in archival sources, and even though scholars may later study them as separate categories of elite and market women, still, Sanders Johnson joins them together. That is, the author literally places these women in the same sentences with one another. Her stylistic choice buttresses her feminist framing: that these women who occupied the same physical space, whether as female domestic staff or career woman, equally contributed to Haitian society. This is why she actually lists them side by side, equally, in the same sentence. Although it could be missed by a general reader, her choice is a refreshing one.<\/p>\n Sanders Johnson writes of the efforts of Haiti\u2019s first female social worker, Jeanne Sylvain: \u201cShe was no longer being paid, but she was working,\u201d and of Amise\u2019s care for Jeanne\u2019s sister, Suzanne Sylvain, as they grieved parental loss. Suzanne would become Haiti\u2019s first female anthropologist. Amise (listed in the archives with no surname) was one of the domestic workers in the Sylvains\u2019 family home. These examples illustrate the labor of fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em>, whether unpaid, underpaid, or paid. It also highlights the author\u2019s method of placing Haiti\u2019s multiclassed women and named and unnamed women side by side, stylistically on the same page.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen did not need feminism to understand inequality,\u201d Sanders Johnson asserts. Sanders Johnson\u2019s analyses remind us that even whether or not fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em> identified as feminists, a caring ethos for other women was invariably present. They took care of one another, their shared nation, and their fellow citizens. As soldiers in Haiti\u2019s\u2019 1791\u20131804 revolution and the many, many varied sociopolitical movements since, Haitian feminists preserved fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em> contributions through plays, lectures, a revolutionary lunch menu, marches, and their ongoing archival assembly. Sanders Johnson\u2019s look at the women\u2019s creation and leadership of the Ligue F\u00e9minine d’Action Sociale (Women\u2019s League for Social Action, LFAS) and their publications in La Voix des Femmes <\/em>(The women\u2019s voice) are enlightening. We learn how the LFAS leaders positioned their acts publicly. They \u201cuntethered the movement from a strict focus on political rights within state governance, and prioritized changes in the social structures of the nation.\u201d This flexibility served them as Haiti moved from the periods of US invasion, postoccupation, a military junta, and dictatorships. Suzanne Sylvain pioneered the ethnographic study of the West African elements in Haitian Creole\/Krey\u00f2l, predating the well-known Institut d\u2019Ethnologie. Sanders Johnson and Brunson position Haitian women and African-descended Cuban women as the storytellers, theorists, and archivists of their past.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Readers are also exposed to how fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em> navigated political, physical, and verbal violence. While some of them had male family and friend allies or protectors, Haitian women by large endured threats to their character, morality, and personhood. Disparaging language, whether in the nation\u2019s many constitutions, journal writings, or public debates, marked them as noncitizens, indecent, mad, and sexually loose.<\/p>\n Their story is a beautiful offering to academia and the public. Sanders Johnson\u2019s rigorous research and her lyrical prose invites readers into the lives and stories of fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em> and Haiti. The work is a touching tribute to fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em>\u2019s past and present.<\/p>\n Takkara K. Brunson\u2019s Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba<\/em> is also a tour de force. Brunson\u2019s work historicizes \u201cBlack Cuban women\u2019s social thought over a period of seventy-three years.\u201d While technically covering less than a century, in tackling the years between 1886 and 1959, Brunson is taking on a tangle of political uprisings, formations, and reformations: Cuba\u2019s original independence struggle (1868\u201398); abolition and enslaved apprenticeship; the republican era; US imperialism\u2019s various iterations; a dictatorship; and Cuba\u2019s 1959 revolution.<\/p>\n African-descended Cuban women and men were deeply involved in the 1868\u201398 revolution as soldiers, veterans, and affiliates. It was a time when Jose Mart\u00ed and his allies promoted an optimistic yet limited ideology of a raceless Cuba. Mart\u00ed\u2019s nationalism identified those formerly enslaved white Cubans, and the interracial and interethnic mixes in between, as one Cuba. That ideology understandably complicated the lives of Afro-Cubans. Brunson\u2019s work highlights the manner in which African-descended Cubans, particularly women, delicately balanced this \u201cracial etiquette.\u201d She writes, \u201cAbolition presented Blacks with opportunities to assert control over their daily lives, yet many whites continued to exercise control over the mobility of laboring African descendants.\u201d For examples, in 1910 Cuban society criminalized political organizing along racial lines (read: Black lines), killed African-descended Cubans in 1912, and discriminated against non-white Cubans by limiting their educational, professional, and political rights. At the same time, however, African-descended Cubans founded and led mutual aid societies and political organizations and earned degrees as lawyers, educators, and journalists. From 1878 into the 1890s, African-descended Cuban women were landholders.<\/p>\n Overall, Cuba\u2019s norms for racial and\/or gendered political and social behaviors were layered and complex, particularly for its African-descended citizens. Brunson meticulously unfolds how Black women in Cuba navigated these complexities. She demonstrates how Black women held diverse political agendas, not just one. What is<\/em> clear is that these women\u2019s actions were consistent and public facing.<\/p>\n We learn the names and stories of Black women from across the island, such as Cristina Ayala, Lucrecia Gonz\u00e1lez Consuegra, Consuelo Serra y Heredia, Vicenta Garcia de Estenoz, Esperanza Sanchez Mastrapa, and many others. Collectively, these women helped build their nation and contributed to their race\u2019s and <\/em>gender\u2019s progress. African-descended Cuban women promoted \u201cracial regeneration\u201d ideas2<\/a><\/sup> and practiced racial uplift. They educated and opened schools. They used print media and portrait sitting, and penned letters. They also organized, led, and participated in the National Women\u2019s Congresses, political groups, and parties. For instance, Ana Joaquina Sosa y Gonz\u00e1lez founded a school to educate girls of African descent, and others created a biweekly magazine devoted to woman of color from 1888 to 1890 with the title Minerva: Revista Universal Dedicada a la Mujer de Color. <\/em><\/p>\n\n Their efforts \u201cchallenged elite white notions of civilized feminine behavior.\u201d For example, in the process of penning letters to Black male politicians about the racial, educational, and gendered discriminations they faced, these women assembled an archive of their presence and of their public engagement. Like some of their male counterparts, African-descended Cuban women used lawsuits and protests to launch these grievances. Cuban women and their male allies also fought back against the violent languages and \u201cstudies\u201d used against them. Public discourse had long debased African-descended and mixed Cuban women as deceitful, indecent mulatas, <\/em>or enjoined them to be \u201cself-sacrificing and long suffering \u2026 angels \u2026 pure virgins.\u201d But African-descended Cuban men could ally themselves with women in responding to these diatribes and urge them to ignore these sordid, racist opinions.<\/p>\n The book invites readers to learn about African-descended Cuban women, including and going beyond Mariana Grajales Cuello. The latter, Brunson argues, assumed many tropes in Cuban society as mother, moral leader, and patriot. Brunson points out that while Grajales remains celebrated and two African-descended Cuban women have now been vice presidents, many Black women are still left at \u201cthe margins of political institutions\u201d and continue to suffer discrimination. Ultimately, Brunson leaves us with a rhetorical question: Will Cuba\u2019s two vice presidents (at the time) adhere to the race-less or race-based national discourses? In sum, Black Women, Citizenship, and the Making of Modern Cuba<\/em> is an engaging, well-researched academic work. The book should be required reading alongside other key scholarship about Cuba\u2019s past.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the roadside, in homes, or at the marketplaces, Haitian women studied women\u2019s history, culture, and politics\u2014all without formal education.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":54215,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[56,347,448,14,1598,1244,39],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1138],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-54194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-cuba","tag-global-black-history","tag-haiti","tag-history","tag-university-of-florida-press","tag-university-of-north-carolina-press","tag-women","section-global-black-history"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n What if Black Women Were Free?<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Marina Magloire <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n
\n<\/p>\n\n
\nWhether on the roadside, in homes and political halls, or at the marketplace, Haitian women studied women\u2019s history, culture, and politics, all without formal education. In the process, Haitian women without traditional schooling shared with their more traditionally educated counterparts their thoughts on matrimony, female friendships, and their desires for professional skills. The elite fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em> who created the school Foyer Ouvrier (open foyer) wanted to care for their fellow working-class women by providing a space for their rest and relaxation. They quickly learned, however, that their fellow fanm ayisy\u00e8n<\/em> desired French language skills and membership to the Girls Scouts to benefit themselves and their families, and, by extension, Haiti. Sanders Johnson touchingly presents many examples where you \u201chear\u201d how women voiced their intentions, exhaustion, victories, comraderies, and challenges.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n \n When Panama Came to Brooklyn<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
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<\/a>\n \n Kaysha Corinealdi <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n