We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century - Softcover

Sterling, Dorothy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393302520 ISBN 13: 9780393302523

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated, 1985

Synopsis

"A remarkable documentary and the first in-depth record of many black women, slave and free."--Dorothy B. Porter, curator emeritus, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University

About this title

Review:

We Are Your Sisters, a collection of letters, oral histories, and excerpts from diaries and autobiographies, is "a documentary portrayal of black women who lived between 1800 and the 1880s." As such, We Are Your Sisters provides a panoramic portrait of black women's lives, presenting the words of laundresses and maids, of writers and teachers. You'll find the testimonies of slave women, as collected in the 1920s and '30s by the Federal Writers Project, on such matters as work, courtship, and family life; letters from slave women that include moving appeals for husbands to save them from slave traders; and first-person accounts of women's resistance to slavery. There are also letters from women such as Rosetta Douglass Sprague, the daughter of Frederick Douglass; accounts of the doings of upper-class blacks in the years following the Civil War; and excerpts from the diary of Frances Rollin, author of a biography of black activist and Civil War soldier Martin Delany.

About the Author:

Dorothy Sterling is a native New Yorker now living on Cape Cod in Wellfleet. She has made many trips to Nantucket, Block Island, Martha's Vineyard, and Long Island. She is a painstaking and thorough researcher with a long list of natural history, biography, and fiction books to her credit.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Incorporated
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0393302520
• ISBN 13: 9780393302523
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 535