Customer Reviews

African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Blacks in the Diaspora)

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Rosalyn Terborg-Penn is a Black nationalist feminist. Like revisionist histories written by White nationalists, her extreme political agenda manifests itself throughout her book. Terborg-Penn does include a caveat about her revisionism in the first chapter/preface of the book. This does not excuse the bias that colors the rest of her work. Terborg-Penn provides a valuable service to her field by rescuing primary documents from oblivion and compiling them. Unfortunately, her analyses of those documents are often transparent designs serving her primary interest as a Black nationalist feminist.
In certain portions of the book, Terborg-Penn acts like an inquisitor. She sifts through political maneuvers made by White woman suffragists uncovering examples of ex post facto racism and disloyalty towards their Black woman suffrage counterparts. Iconoclastically, Terborg-Penn censures famous White woman suffragists for using White woman suffrage-first political strategies instead of universal suffrage-only political strategies. Throughout the whole book, compromising vignettes about the White woman suffrage lobby appear with regularity. The whole book may be a vehicle for this racial shakedown.
African American Women has an organizational style that I found distracting. Terborg-Penn's paragraphs conform to an approximately chronological succession but the topics are listed in random order. While the chapters are laid out in an intelligible way, the information within them is a morass. One non sequitur irrelevantly follows another. Without an overarching narrative, the book is schizophrenic and difficult to comprehend. Its as though the author has refused to interpret any of the larger events covered in the book in exchange for the one interpretive license of Black nationalist feminism. The resulting structural labyrinth makes it hard to know the book.

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn has taken on an arduous task. Sufficiently uncovering the nuances of African American women's roles in the struggle for suffrage would be possible only for a highly-trained historian. Unfortunately, Terborg-Penn writes not as an objective historian, but as a woman with strong, personal opinions on her subject. As her opinions take over, the facts recede and the book becomes a vehicle for her subjectivity. She forces her evidence to conform to a seemingly pre-formed, inflexible thesis and conclusion, leaving the reader with knowledge of little more than Terborg-Penn's opinions.