Synopses & Reviews
"Much of the material unearthed by this book is ugly," writes Morton whose book exposes a multitude of dehumanizing constructions of reality embedded in American scholarly studies of the history of the Afro-American woman. Disfigured Images explores the "literature of fact" concerning black women during a century of American historiography extending from the late 19th century to the present and finds a body of work that "presented little fact and much fiction." The volume is a long-needed refutation of a caricatured, mythical version of Black women's history.
About the Author
PATRICIA MORTON is Associate Professor in the History Department at Trent University, Ontario, Canada.
Table of Contents
Myths of black womanhood -- Century ago -- Age of Jim Crow -- All-mother vision of W.E.B. Du Bois -- Slave women of the sociological imagination -- Prefabricated women of the Mid-Twentieth Century -- Invisible, shrinking woman -- Black studies/women's studies -- Rediscovering the black family -- Toward discovering slave women.