Browse
In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois discusses the historical and cultural importance of the Black preacher as “a leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’… the centre of a group of men.” I propose we reimagine Du Bois’s Black preacher figure—in his words, “the most unique personality developed on American soil”—as a Black woman. Additionally, we should examine the sermon in African American literature as we focus on womanist preachers and spiritual figures such as Margaret Alexander in The Amen Corner, the sisters in Go Tell It on the Mountain, and most significantly, Julia in Just Above My Head. Coining the term, “womanist hermeneutic of regeneration,” this article demonstrates the affective power of examining blue note womanist preachers and spiritual figures in James Baldwin’s work.
The first chapter analyses how concerns about gender, race, and class converged in the foundation of the GFS in 1875. Using memoirs from Mary Elizabeth Townsend and other founders of the organisation as well as GFS meeting minute books and newsletters and leaflets, this chapter describes the formation and structure of the organisation and situates the GFS within broader social purity, child rescue, and imperialist movements in the late Victorian era. Purity was the guiding and defining principle of the GFS’s wide-ranging work, in England and the empire. The GFS required that its members be sexually pure, but this stipulation was rooted in broader concerns about social and racial purity. The fervent commitment to ensuring the purity of the white race – and by extension its supposed superiority – justified the GFS’s social reform work among the working classes in England. Organisers particularly targeted domestic servants for membership in the GFS and sought to solve ‘the servant crisis’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by training girls in household skills and acting as an employment agency that connected prospective servants with employers. The GFS also used purity to justify extending its reach in the empire through the establishment of colonial branches and missionary programmes. Yet even in its early years, the GFS was troubled by debates about key issues, including the age and qualifications of its members and its central rule on girls’ purity, and these fault lines within the organisation would grow more pronounced in the succeeding decades.
Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies, Ernest Champion was instrumental in bringing James Baldwin to the Bowling Green campus. Upon Baldwin’s death, December 1, 1987, Champion wrote the following remembrance, which has not been previously published.
Despite his several long periods of residence in Istanbul, James Baldwin published little about his experiences there. Visual documentation, however, is abundant—much more so than for any other place associated with Baldwin—because of the Turkish-American photographer Sedat Pakay. Although better known for his short film James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973), Pakay also took scores of still photographs of Baldwin. This article draws on the work of Magdalena J. Zaborowska and includes previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works. Selected from Pakay’s extensive archives, these photographs illustrate the comfort and freedom Baldwin found in Istanbul, which led to his most productive period.
This chapter provides an examination of Shena’s contributions to local government in housing, education, women’s rights and, in particular, municipal taxation reform. In demonstrating that Shena took a wide-ranging and comprehensive approach to local government, the chapter expands our knowledge of, and challenges standard interpretations about, women’s historic role in municipal politics. Furthermore, in illustrating Shena’s commitment to local government, the chapter complements recent studies which are challenging the supposed notion of decline in the strength of local government as well as the demise of municipal elites in the first part of the twentieth century.
The last chapter explores the decline of the organisation in the interwar years. It outlines key factors that contributed to its waning influence, including its ageing leadership, competition with other organisations, disagreements with the Anglican Church, and difficulties adapting to social changes and appealing to the modern girl. Debates over the possible amendment of the organisation’s central rule on purity, which stipulated that all members be virgins, exacerbated fractures within the GFS and crystallised how out of touch the organisation had become to girls and their concerns. The organisation clung to its Victorian foundations and models of girlhood, even as that Victorian social order was being uprooted during the First World War and interwar years. The decline of the organisation also coincided with the growth of national sentiment and unrest in many regions of the empire, especially India. Disputes within the organisation mirrored growing divisions within the empire, as members in the colonies increasingly challenged the colonial, hierarchical structure of the organisation. Although India had once been heralded as ‘the G.F.S. Jewel’, the GFS decided to cease its operations in the area in 1933, which was the result of systemic problems within the organisation and served as a harbinger the GFS’s decline throughout the empire. This decline represented an increasing scepticism and disillusionment with the GFS’s professed commitment to caring for, preserving, and protecting ‘the Girlhood of Our Empire’.