Reconstructing motherhood: Pauline Hopkins' 'Contending Forces.'

From: Studies in American Fiction | Date: September 22, 1996| Author: | Copyright information

Pauline Hopkins's portrayal of black motherhood in 'Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South' serves as a cautionary correction to the optimism of Emancipation. Both slave and early twentieth- century mothers are shown as subject to masculine exploitation, unable to take control of either their own bodies or their children. Hopkins linked racial advancement to the end of violence against women.

In his foreword to the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. names Phillis Wheatley the symbolic mother of the black ...

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