- 237 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About This Book
What role did African American men have in the early twentieth-century struggle for women's suffrage? How is gender significant to the historical and contemporary struggles for African American liberation? In Womanist Forefathers, Gary L. Lemons examines the memoirs and political writings on women by Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, positioning these radical proponents of female equality as "womanist forefathers" to later generations of gender progressive black men. Lemons argues that the writings of Douglass and Du Bois, which merge confessional narrative with social criticism, demonstrate the power of pro-womanist thinking in the vision of racial uplift both men advanced. Womanist Forefathers then traces the lineage between these early African American activists to contemporary pro-feminist black men, many of whom have similarly combined analyses of the personal with the political to envision a black male brotherhood founded on womanist principles, free from nationalism rooted in patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia.
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Table of contents
- Womanist Forefathers
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue: Theorizing a Pro-Woman(ist) Politics of Gender Justice before, during,and after āThe Black Sexism Debateā
- Introduction: Black Men Writing Ourselves into Pro-woman(ist) Being(s) in the Name of the Black Maternal
- Part 1. Reclaiming Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Boisas Womanist Forefathers
- Part II. Black Feminist āSisters,ā āBrothers,āand Fathers: Securing the Womanist Legacy
- Epilogue: āThis Is What a (Black Male)Feminist Looks LikeāTime Has Brought about a Change
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index