Abstract
I am a woman who was once a girl who loved to read stories. I readily imagined myself as Heidi though I wasn’t Swiss, as Wilma Rudolph though I couldn’t run fast, and as Wonder Woman though I had no gold tiara and was not and never would be really good with a lariat. My imagined self merged into my experienced self, and both were affected by the self I was told I was or should become. I am a literary historian who believes that our stories reflect and define our identities. I am one of those who affirm that we can know what is true, and that we must tell the truth if we are to be free. Like many of my ilk, I take it as gospel that sometimes the only way truth can be told is through fiction. Not coincidently, I am an African American woman reared in segregated neighborhoods, educated in a segregated school system, graduated with honors from predominantly white universities, and instrumental in founding the first women’s studies department and one of the first black-studies departments in the nation. And I am one who has defied the odds by making and keeping intimate friendships with women who do not share the same stories.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988)
Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)
Susan Stanford Friedman, Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
Emilie M[aureen] Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993)
Goria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987)
Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers (New York: Pergamon, 1985)
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York: New Press, 1995).
Many feminist and womanist scholars, such as Emilie Townes, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, and Renita Weems, have written about ways in which Hagar and Jezebel influence our concepts. Some, such as Jacqueline Grant and Wilma Ann Bailey, have directly considered differences of ethnic and cultural heritages in interpretations. See, for example, Bailey, “Black and Jewish Women Consider Hagar,” Encounter (Winter 2002) 37–45.
Hurston names Janie’s grandmother “Nanny,” a word in which the “n” is only one letter or one pen stroke removed from “m” in “mammy.” Janie’s statement, “… Ah never called mah Grandma nothin’ but Nanny, ’cause dat’s what everybody on de place called her” foregrounds “Nanny’s” lost name. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; reprint, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978) 20.
Catherine Clinton, Tara Revisited: Women, War and the Plantation Legend (New York: Abbeville, 1995).
Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (New York: William Morrow, 1986) 5.
Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russworm, eds., “Mary Davis: A True Story,” Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827. The narrative is set in England, so Mary Davis was not necessarily of African ancestry. However, the article was published in a newspaper for, by, and about African Americans and is consequently influenced by its context. Clearly, readers are expected to identify with the heroic mother.
Maria W. Stewart, Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987) 38.
Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Contexts, Criticism, ed. Nellie Y. McKay and Frances Smith Foster (1861; reprint, New York: Norton, 2001) 75.
Daniel A. Payne, “Matrimony,” Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and Art (January 1859).
Aaron McGruder, “The Boondocks,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 1, 2005.
George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)
Zakes Mda, Cion (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2007).
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991)
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)
Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Dial, 1961) 116.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2010 Bernadette J. Brooten
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Foster, F.S. (2010). Mammy’s Daughters; Or, the DNA of a Feminist Sexual Ethics. In: Brooten, B.J. (eds) Beyond Slavery. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113893_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230113893_16
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-10017-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-11389-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)