Making Black Girls Real: Reconstructing Black Girlhood In the U.S., 1861-1963

Abstract

From the 1861 publication of Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to Norman Rockwell’s iconic image of first-grader Ruby Bridges walking alongside U.S. marshals to integrate her elementary school in 1960, the black-girl figure and performances of black girlhood are present within popular texts, images, archival materials, and cultural work produced in the U.S. Yet, black girls and their girlhoods are noticeably absent in dominant historical conversations of childhood, and thus Jacobs’s narrative of slave-girl life in bondage or Ruby Bridges’s integration of her school are not read as constituting a visible history of black girlhood or a significant period in the formation of black female political as well as intellectual identity in the U.S. History scholars of the U.S. Civil War through Civil Rights Movement have begun to recognize children as important historical actors and childhood as a key site of cultural knowledge. However, these scholars have failed to examine the epistemological, historical, or theoretical importance of black girls or their girlhoods. As a result, the historical record endorses racialized ideologies of childhood that render black girlhood illegible and black girls exempt from the analytical category of children or girls in U.S. culture. My dissertation addresses the exemption of black girls from the socially-constructed categories of childhood and girlhood by recovering black girls as historical actors and illuminating constitutive elements of black girlhood in the U.S. from the antebellum period through the Civil Rights Movement. I argue that within historical discourses of childhood and in the dominant visual field, the intersections of race, class, gender, and age render black girls illegible, or incapable of being read or “seen” as girls with valuable girlhoods. To make black girls and their lived experiences legible, I draw on Black Feminist and Queer theories to inform my discursive, literary, and visual cultural methods of investigating a diverse collection of nineteenth-century slave narratives, popular novels, images in popular press, children’s literature, and archival sources including the unpublished autobiography of black-girl Civil Rights activist Brenda Travis.