Real-Life Heroines: How Women Reformers Wrote One Another’s Lives in the Sea Islands, 1838– 1902

FAIN: FT-291509-23

Mollie Elizabeth Barnes
University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC 29208-0001)

Research and writing of a book on how women reformers in the Sea Islands of South Carolina historicized their peers in journals, diaries, biographies, and other forms of life writing.

Real-Life Heroines studies how women reformers in the Sea Islands historicized their peers in various forms of life writing: journals, diaries, biographies. I study how race and gender intersect in women’s textual representations of one another and argue that white women reformers’ mostly do-good meddling, mediating, and writing on behalf of enslaved/liberated Black women in fact often silenced or compromised them. I demonstrate how Black women reclaim and transform life writing on their own terms. What once seemed like knots I couldn’t untangle—what problems arise when white women narrate Black women’s lives? where and how were Black women documenting one another?—actually became my most important throughlines: tensions, silences, revisions, and even painful erasures that white women powerbrokers triggered within print-culture networks designed to protect Black women. Real-Life Heroines then amplifies and studies life writing that Black women published as counternarratives.

Associated Products

Paper Heroines: How Women Reformers Wrote One Another's Lives in the Sea Islands, 1838-1902 (Book)
Title: Paper Heroines: How Women Reformers Wrote One Another's Lives in the Sea Islands, 1838-1902
Abstract: Paper Heroines: How Women Reformers Wrote One Another's Lives in the Sea Islands, 1838–1902 (forthcoming, USC Press 2025)—studies activist women's journals/diaries and biographies, and it examines how Black and white women activists wrote one another in and out of local literary histories.
Year: 2025
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

"First Impressions, Preserved and Erased: Reading Charlotte Forten and Laura Towne Next to One Another." (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: "First Impressions, Preserved and Erased: Reading Charlotte Forten and Laura Towne Next to One Another."
Author: Mollie Elizabeth Barnes
Abstract: n/a
Date: 05/01/2023
Primary URL: https://americanliteratureassociation.org/
Conference Name: American Literature Association Conference

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