Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935
African American women in the early-twentieth century made significant contributions toward the development of a black feminist tradition, were at the forefront of black nationalism, and challenged the apparent dichotomy between black nationalism and integrationism. Kate Dossett examines the political thought and cultural production of prominent black women leaders in the years between the founding of the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and the National Council of Negro Women in 1935.By featuring the contributions of women like the pioneering black hairdresser, Madam C. J. Walker, and her daughter, as well as club woman Mary McLeod Bethune and United Negro Improvement Association activist Amy Jacques Garvey, Dossett also makes a distinctive contribution to the field of women's history by challenging the reverse class bias that has meant that middle-class women have been deemed less worthy of study, or worse, dubbed assimilationist and accused of lacking race pride.While revealing the depth and complexity of black women's thought in the early twentieth century and highlighting their contribution to a black feminist tradition of activism, "Bridging Race Divides" positions black women at the forefront of both intellectual and practical endeavors in the struggle for black autonomy.
Gender and Nation
Abstract The article outlines some of the main dimensions in which gender relations are crucial in understanding and analysing the phenomena of nations and nationalism, and the specific boundaries of inclusions and exclusions that they construct. Three major dimensions of nationalist projects that relate to citizenship, culture and origin are differentiated. In each of them gender relations play specific roles and have mobilized specific struggles. The article looks at the dualistic nature of women's citizenship, as both included and excluded from the general body of citizens. Even when there is a formal equality of women in their political rights as citizens, other modes of exclusion in the political, social and civil spheres continue to operate. The particular ways in which the entry of women into the military has been linked to struggles for women's equality as citizens are examined in this context. In relation to national cultures, both secular and religious, the article examines the ways in which wom...
Marxism and Nationalism
The conceptualisation of national phenomena presents a series of difficulties and contradictions for modern social theories. Since the emergence of both Marxism and sociology, the concern of theory has been to explain social phenomena by constantly refining a universal logic. Slowly but surely, the apparent mystery of specificities and localisms was to be unravelled by the penetrating force of logically refined and empirically tested theories. Their task was to enhance human perceptions of social realities, much in the same way as the theory of gravity and the theory of relativity enhanced tie understanding of the way in which the universe works. The Tower of Pisa and the Newtonian Apple were no longer self contained phenomena, but the result of the laws of gravity, an aprioristic condition that transcended the immediate existence of the tower and the apple. Thus, the modern concept of causality emerged in Physics, as the at times empirical, at times theoretical, ascertainable combination of conditions which is usually followed by a predictable occurrence which constitutes its effect.1