In the American body politic, the black female body had been made invisible and was divided by proprietors. During slavery, the black female body was conceptually divided into parts: physical and mental, as well as religious and nonreligious. For instance, in Clotel; Or, The President’s Daughter (1853), a novel by William Wells Brown, a 16-year-old enslaved girl is assessed according to the value of all of her individual body parts, as well as her characteristics. The author describes how her total value ($1,500) was determined:
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” cried the auctioneer, and the maiden was struck for that sum. This was a Southern auction, at which the bones, muscles, sinews, ←4 | 5→blood, and nerves of a young lady of sixteen were sold for five hundred dollars; her moral character for two hundred; her improved intellect for one hundred; her Christianity for three hundred; and her chastity and virtue for four hundred dollars more.29
In this quote, Brown, a formerly enslaved writer, dramatizes the detailed process of turning a female body into a piece of merchandize. Speculators appraised the woman’s “chastity and virtue”—that is, whether her hymen was broken—in the same manner in which they assessed her other body parts. Thus, an enslaved woman’s body was metaphorically divided by slave traders, speculators, and customers, who collaborated to decide the accurate price of her whole body.
Bodies That Work describes the redefinition of such an invisible, fragmented, and commodified African American female body in early twentieth-century America. I argue that the four African American women examined in this book challenged the black female body’s social insignificance during and after the Progressive Era and provided alternative interpretations, such that it could become a substantial part of the larger body politic. These women are Sarah Breedlove Walker, entrepreneur of hair care products, also widely known as Madam C. J. Walker (1867–1919); E. Azalia Hackley (1867–1922), a soprano singer and musical organizer; Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968), one of the earliest female sculptors in the United States; and Josephine Baker (1906–1975), a St. Louis-born internationally famous singer and dancer. These inspirational, professional women attempted to integrate the divided body parts of African American women into one whole body by redefining themselves and by retrieving the autonomy of their material bodies—bodies that, under slavery, had been commodified, exploited, and stigmatized by the slave-owning South.
This project focuses on the several decades at the turn of the twentieth century—decades that correspond to both the Progressive Era and beyond—from the 1890s to the mid-1930s, as progressivism partly facilitated these African American women’s corporeal activism.30 In this era, the United States witnessed rapid industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, thereby forcing people to confront the consequences of these changes and further compelling them to address emerging social evils. Historian Alan Brinkley defines progressivism as “a protest by an aroused citizenry against the excessive power of urban bosses, corporate moguls, and corrupt elected officials.”31 Brinkley argues that progressives attempted to “restore order and stability to their turbulent society” through various reform initiatives—social, political, and spiritual.32 For instance, moral crusaders investigated the corruption of corporate moguls, labor union leaders, and government ←5 | 6→officials; muckrakers, such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, inflamed anger in their sensational exposé; and journalists and authors enthusiastically uncovered problems related to child labor, slums and ghettoes, prostitution, sexism, and racism.33 Notably, progressives embraced a naïve trust in the progress. The historian David Blanke asserts that “scientific” theories were rampant in the Progressive Era and that although American progressivism was “largely an optimistic faith in the ability of science and rational thought to address the worst abuses of modern life,” it paradoxically advanced traditional racial, ethnic, class, and gender prejudices.34 So flooded with changes, confusion, and disorder was progressive America that it allowed anyone and everyone with cause to challenge evils both old and new.
Progressivism also destabilized the hierarchies of race, class, and gender. In progressive America, African Americans became financially visible as wage earners, consumers, and business owners for the first time in American history. In Desegregating the Dollar, Robert E. Weems, Jr., observes that African Americans’ standards of living were much improved in the early twentieth century; the domestic labor shortage experienced during World War I allowed black people residing in the North to command higher salaries, and the Great Migration caused a similar labor shortage in the South, raising African Americans’ wages as a result.35 By 1920, some urban African American men and women in the North and in the South “had more money to spend than ever before,” participating in American capitalism as newly emerging consumers.36 They also emerged into the political spotlight, adapted themselves to modern American society through various routes that had previously been closed for them, and armed themselves with a strong voice and firm attitude toward opposing social injustice.37
In this rapidly changing society full of conflicting values, African American women also began to use their bodies (or body parts) in new ways and ventured into professions wherein they had typically not been represented before. These were bodies that worked—that is, laboring, functioning, and achieving in terms of collective empowerment. These black female bodies overcame racial, ethnic, class, and gender divides and negotiated with the ideas and values of political, financial, and intellectual leadership, dispelling the tenacious stereotypes of womanhood associated with slavery. Their work was not just physical but also cultural because their bodies created an interactive, interpretive space for women’s present and future agency. Work enabled black women to place their ostracized, stigmatized bodies into the larger body politic, demonstrating that they were worthier and more capable than previously thought and allowing them to assume roles with a higher value in the political and financial apparatus of the state. When African American women had been enslaved, they had been unpaid servants, ←6 | 7→cooks, babysitters, wet nurses, cleaners, and field hands and had been sexually abused in their roles as breeders and concubines. In progressive America, their bodies had agency—bodies earning money and creating value—which liberated them from the fetters of white male exploitation.
This book centers on the four African American women—Walker, Hackley, Fuller, and Baker—who distinguished themselves through their professions in response to the changing body politic. Their professions in the fields of entrepreneurship, music (opera), art (sculpture), and the performing arts (singing and dancing) were atypical of the generation of African American women whose parents were either legally or virtually in bondage. These women entered new professions that required physical work and reshaped the racial and gender division of labor. A “modern” society, full of contradictory perspectives and future uncertainties, assisted in the pursuit of their goals.
Scholarly research on African American women in the Progressive Era has long focused on stories of intellectual and middle-class women, particularly those involved in social reforms, mainly through printed documents. For instance, in Lifting as They Climb (1996; originally published in 1933), Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, calling herself “an ardent club woman,” describes how the black women’s club movement was enabled by middle-class women such as Mary Church Terrell and Fannie Barrier Williams, who taught black