North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood by XiomaraSantamarinaReview by: Claudrena N. HaroldThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 83, No. 2 (APRIL 2006), pp. 280-281Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23523110 .

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280 Book Reviews

Moving beyond black nationalism strands of racial self-determination, pan Africanism and emigrationism, Francesca Morgan plows new ground in studying black

women's identities via their attachment to the United States. Black clubwomen's

debates on American identity pre-dated the Civil War, and after emancipation clubwomen engaged in monument building, promotion of black history, and education

of black youth. They generally objected to the white supremacy that undergirded

imperialism, and often critically pondered questions of empire. Politically minded

African American women lost ground with the emergence of a national male-led civil

rights movement in the early twentieth century, yet black women-centered nationalism

persevered. It achieved a major milestone in 1922 with the opening of the Frederick

Douglass Flome, the nation's first house museum administered by African American

women. The 1920s brought disagreement among blacks between those stressing their

Americanness and those (especially Garveyites) identifying primarily with a worldwide

race-based Diaspora. All experienced "hostile surveillance" at the hands of the state

throughout the decade.

Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America is richly researched, and the footnotes are

meaty and valuable. The terminology, however, sometimes makes the work a cumber

some read. Francesca Morgan's brief epilogue reminds us that epic events, from Marian

Anderson's Lincoln Memorial "Freedom Concert" in 1939 to the rigid state- based

nationalism generated by the tragedy of September 11, 2001, have insured that

definitions of national patriotism will continue to have multiple meaning in an

increasingly diverse America.

James Madison University

Sidney R. Bland

Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. By Xiomara

Santamarina. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Frontispiece,

acknowledgments, introduction, preface, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. xiv,

222. $18.95, paper; $45.00, cloth.)

An engaging text offering new perspectives on The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Eliza Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig, and Elizabeth

Keckley's Behind the Scenes, Xiomara Santamarina's Belabored Professions examines the

ways in which these women writers invoked their status as productive wage earners in

staking their claims to civic entitlement, cultural legitimacy, and intellectual authority. Santamarina opens her study with a nuanced reading of Sojourner Truth's neglected 1850 autobiography, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth. She details the ways in which the noted abolitionist's rhetorical representation of her labor challenged notions of

femininity espoused in bourgeois ideology as well as black reformers' pronounced tendency to associate unskilled labor with immutable servility and racial degradation.

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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Book Reviews 281

"Truth," Santamarina explains, "spoke the language of yeoman republicanism to

subvert the connotations of moral and sexual degradation attached to black women's

enslaved field labor. She tapped the vein of independence associated with this rhetoric

to challenge received notions of field slaves as necessarily ignorant beings unfit for

citizenship."

Continuing her exploration of working black women's literary challenges to the

dominant racial uplift ideology of the antebellum period, Santamarina also discuses the

representation of black working womanhood in Harriet Wilson's 1859 fictionalized

autobiography, Our Nig. The book's literary significance, according to Santamarina,

lies in its suggestion "that black workers in menial positions could actually aspire to

racial independence and self-reliance, despite their evident exclusion from norms of

occupational mobility." When the protagonist (Frado) recognizes the extent to which

her unskilled labor contributes to her employers' economic prosperity she can finally break free of the existential agony that grips her throughout much of the narrative.

Such a representation of black elevation, according to Santamarina, was extremely

important in a society where black workers struggled to "move outside the discriminatory

occupational structures to which they were consigned." To further demonstrate the heterogeneity of the black antebellum literary tradition,

Santamarina's last two chapters focus on two narratives advocating black women's

social legitimacy from the perspective of skilled and entrepreneurial workers: Eliza

Potter's A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life and Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes.

Working as a hairdresser for several elite white families, Eliza Potter published her very controversial exposé of Cincinnati's social elite in 1859. Antebellum reporters

presented the hairdresser's social critique of her clients as mere gossip, but Santamarina

views A Hairdresser's Experience as an attempt to participate in and shape contemporan eous discussions on class, white womanhood, femininity, and race. Not surprisingly, she

provides a similar assessment of Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes. Employed as a

seamstress for Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, Keckley detailed her working

experiences in the White House and her personal relationship with Mary Todd

Lincoln. Moving beyond a simplistic analysis of whether or not Keckley's book betrayed

Lincoln, Santamarina explores how "the norms for black female labor, elaborated in

Behind the Scenes conflict with both common sense assumptions about privacy and the

invisibility of the labor that produces the interrelated racial and class privilege at the

core of white sentimental subjectivity." Providing an erudite analysis of an under

appreciated text, Santamarina deepens our understanding of nineteenth-century black

working women's commitment to making and disseminating knowledge about

themselves, their community, and the wider world. Such insight makes Belabored

Professions an invaluable contribution to the fields of literary criticism, American

history, and African American studies.

University of Virginia

Claudrena N. Harold

VOLUME LXXIIl • NUMBER 2 • APRIL 2006

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