Synopses & Reviews
Hallie Q. Brown--teacher, international lecturer, social activist, and herself a "woman of distinction"--recreates, along with twenty-eight contributors , the lives of sixty remarkable Afro-American women, all born in the United States and Canada between the mid 1740s and the end of the nineteenth century. First published in 1926, Homespun Heroines tells the tales of slaves and social workers, artists and activists, cake makers and homemakers. In so doing, it offers unusual insight into female networks, patterns of voluntary association, work, religion, family life, and black women's culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Review
"Church, school, and club constitute the triumvirate of associations central to the lives of the 60 Afro-American women born in the United States or Canada between the mid-1740s and the end of the nineteenth century and chronicled in
Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction....It is distinguished as a collaborative effort by a group of self-confident and historically self-conscious black women who were determined to preserve the stories of sacrifice and struggle their forebears had endured."--Randall K. Burkett, in his Introduction