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© 2019 Kaisha Esty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 2019 Kaisha Esty ALL RIGHTS RESERVED “A CRUSADE AGAINST THE DESPOILER OF VIRTUE”: BLACK WOMEN, SEXUAL PURITY, AND THE GENDERED POLITICS OF THE NEGRO PROBLEM 1839-1920 by KAISHA ESTY A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the co-direction of Deborah Gray White and Mia Bay And approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey MAY 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “A Crusade Against the Despoiler of Virtue”: Black Women, Sexual Purity, and the Gendered Politics of the Negro Problem, 1839-1920 by KAISHA ESTY Dissertation Co-Directors: Deborah Gray White and Mia Bay “A Crusade Against the Despoiler of Virtue”: Black Women, Sexual Purity, and the Gendered Politics of the Negro Problem, 1839-1920 is a study of the activism of slave, poor, working-class and largely uneducated African American women around their sexuality. Drawing on slave narratives, ex-slave interviews, Civil War court-martials, Congressional testimonies, organizational minutes and conference proceedings, A Crusade takes an intersectional and subaltern approach to the era that has received extreme scholarly attention as the early women’s rights movement to understand the concerns of marginalized women around the sexualized topic of virtue. I argue that enslaved and free black women pioneered a women’s rights framework around sexual autonomy and consent through their radical engagement with the traditionally conservative and racially-exclusionary ideals of chastity and female virtue of the Victorian-era. This is the first full-length project to situate enslaved women within a long tradition of African American women’s struggles for self-defense and sexual self-sovereignty. ii This project focuses on the moral imperatives and objectives that governed individual black women’s sexual agency. A Crusade interrogates the ways that black women’s sexual choices represented their aspirational selves. This project treats the question of what the meaning of sex – sexual identity, sexual practices, biological sex and its attendant duties – was in slave, poor, working-class and uneducated black women’s meanings of freedom. Revisiting the concept of chastity, a term that has been largely read as oppressive in feminist scholarship, this project outlines slave, poor and uneducated black women’s weaponization of this ideal for their own liberation. Fundamentally, this a story of the ways that marginalized women have deployed traditionally conservative and racially-exclusionary ideals for means for radical ends. iii Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the team of brilliant, inspiring, and supportive people that guided me through this journey. I have been extremely lucky with an exceptional committee. I wish to extend a heartfelt thanks to my co-chairs, Dr. Deborah Gray White and Dr. Mia E. Bay, whose individuality of style created a beautiful synergy that pushed me well beyond my intellectual comfort zone. To Dr. White: I’ll forever cherish your wisdom and patient advice on life within and beyond the academy. You saw something in this first-generation, working-class black British-Caribbean woman from Tottenham, London, UK, even when nervousness and imposter-syndrome invaded her perspective. To Dr. Bay: your ability to summarize a ‘rambly’ paragraph in a succinct and incisive sentence is among the many reasons why you’re a wicked (positive UK-slang) advisor. The rest of my committee are just as brilliant. A super thanks to Dr. Beryl Satter, who has been incredibly generous with her time, edits, letters of recommendation and chats over tea. I don’t recall an interaction with Dr. Satter that didn’t involve crucial feedback and a warm smile. Thank you to Dr. Brittney Cooper, who remains an inspiration to rising scholars like myself. And a thank you to my outside reader, Dr. Wanda Hendricks for the support and for always being on one end of an enthusiastic conversation. I stand on the shoulders of pioneering women, without whose hard work and research this project would not be possible. When I applied to the History Ph.D. program at Rutgers University in 2012, I didn’t know that a powerful community of sister-scholars awaited me with open arms. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders entered the program in the same year and has been like a sister to me the entire way. Thank you for the love, support, laughter, draft-edits, happy-hours and vacations that have kept me sane and motivated. This work can be extremely isolating, and loneliness easily looms when you’re far away from family and friends at home. Ashleigh, you have iv contributed greatly to making this country feel like home for me. To Dara Walker, Julia Bowes, Julia Katz, Miya Carey, Kendra Boyd, and the many others at Rutgers: thank you for being colleagues, mentors, resources and friends. My fellow writing-group colleagues, Marika Plater, Amy Zanoni, AJ Blandford, Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders and AJ Murphy are among the most wonderful people on earth. Thank you! It is important for me to acknowledge the advisors and professors at my alma-mater, Nottingham University in the UK, who not only helped to establish my foundation as a scholar but have continued to support me through my graduate career in the US. A special thanks to Dr. Robin Vandome, Dr. Celeste-Marie Bernier, and Dr. Christopher Phelps for the enthusiastic encouragement and opportunities. My research and graduate study was supported by a host of institutions and organizations. I wish to thank the Rutgers History department, the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers University, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the African American Intellectual History Society, and the American Historical Association. I would like to extend a special thank you to Dr. Deborah Gray White for the opportunity to organize a major conference on the theme of “Digital Blackness.” And another special thanks to Dr. Deborah Gray White and Dr. Marisa Fuentes for the opportunity to participate on the award-winning Rutgers Scarlet and Black Project. Each of these institutions, organizations and opportunities have been crucial to my training as a researcher and scholar. Archivists hold a unique place in my heart. I wish to the thank the archivists and staff at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City, the Mabel Douglass Library at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, the Moorland-Spingard Research v Center at Howard University, the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University in New Orleans, the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston, and the University of Illinois Archives in Chicago, among others, for their patience and assistance at various stages of my progress. Throughout my career as a graduate student, I strove to maintain a balance between work and a social life. Along the way, I have maintained and collected life-long friends within and outside the academy that have kindly and patiently indulged long discussions about my research – often with an alcoholic beverage in hand. I wish to thank my dear friends Efunwunmi Coker, Rachel Nelson, Donalea Scott, Jonathan Michael Square, Mazika Li, Jodie Harris, Dale Booth, Satyasika Chakraborty, Marlene Gaynair and Shauni Tiara Adrienne Armstead, and many others. I also fell in love as a graduate student. Thank you to my partner, Stefano Casiraghi for the endless support and care. I come from a family of independent and inspiring black women who are no strangers to hard work. My mother, Judith Blair, continues to energize me in many ways. My grandmother, Hortense Blair, sadly passed on the day that I submitted my dissertation to my committee. But her spirit has guided me the entire way. Of poor and humble origins, she was the most noble and gracious woman I have ever known. She is the reason why I am drawn to this important history of black women. vi Illustrations “Slave Cabin, Built Ca. 1830, Photograph.” Education at Library of Virginia. Library of Virginia, page 123. Emma Crockett’s House, Alabama, United States, 1936. Photograph. Library of Congress. Washington D.C., page 157. vii Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv Illustrations vii Introduction “An impure woman is even dead while she liveth”: 1 The Respectability of Subaltern Women. Chapter 1: “I had resolved that I would be virtuous, though I 29 was a slave.” Chapter 2: “He did the same thing that married people do… I 75 did not give my consent to have that done”: Struggling for Sexual Justice during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Chapter 3: “The one-room log cabin is a pestilent menace to 108 decent living”: Sexual Respectability and the Home Life of Poor Rural Freedwomen. Chapter 4: “Oh, had I known—had I only staid down home”: 168 Urban Migration and Sexual Protection. Epilogue The Continued Struggle for Sexual Self-Sovereignty 201 in the Twentieth-Century. Bibliography 207 viii 1 INTRODUCTION: “An impure woman is even dead while she liveth”1: The Respectability of Subaltern Women As the nineteenth century came to end, the African American Fisk University professor and minister, Eugene Harris was deeply disturbed. The conditions of black sexual life as he perceived them were at a point of crisis. In his book, An Appeal for Social Purity in Negro Homes (1898), he rallied for action. “I plead for the women of society to drop every member that is infected with poison and to make a crusade against the despoiler of virtue, and the foe of the family,” he wrote. 2 Originally produced as a sermon, Harris’s text was revealing of the deeply sexualized anxieties of the African American middle-class at the turn of the twentieth century.
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