African American women's writings in the Woman's Building Library.

This article surveys six African American women whose work was represented in the Woman's Building Library exhibit at the Columbian Exposition: Elleanor Eldridge, Victoria Earle, A. Julia Foote, Frances Harper, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and T. T Purvis. These women's writings cover a variety of genres and styles from novels, short stories, poems, sketches, autobiographies, rhymes, and essays that address such topics as suffrage, partnership, a woman's marital rights, and black enterprise and entrepreneurship.

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No single term can classify the American 1890s. It was the age of millionaires, inventions, office girls, symphony orchestras, and "rags-to-richers." Advances in industry and technology, migrations from the countryside to the cities, immigrant influxes, and increasing material consumption all characterize the last decade of the century. And yet it was also an age of lynching, restricted citizenship, segregation, and Jim Crow politics. These apparent contradictions in advancements and regressions undoubtedly account for the designation of the last decade of the nineteenth century as "the watershed of American history," representative of "the historic divide between past and present America." (1) Poised to enter the new century, replete with advances in agriculture and technology, America had many things to celebrate yet still left many things undone and unsaid. One of the most important of these was its relationship to and its representation of its African American population.

The World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 embodied these same paradoxes. In an introductory address at the fair's official dedication on 21 October 1892, Col. George R. Davis, the director general of the exposition, proclaimed that one of its goals was for all nations "to learn the universal value of the discovery we're commemorating[:]... the nearness of man to man, the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of the human race." (2) In accordance with this desire "nineteen foreign nations--Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, Canada, Ceylon, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Japan, Nicaragua, Norway, Sweden, and Turkey--had their own buildings at the fair." (3) For Americans, the Columbian Exposition had two agendas. A celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's "discovery" of the New World and a celebration of America's own "coming of age" and "grand rite of passage" into an international sphere, the World's Fair had both national and international significance. (4) However, Davis's magnanimity and the initial stages of planning for the fair did not automatically include women and African Americans in the "brotherhood of the human race."

The World's Fair represented a chance for America to show itself off to its international brethren and take pride in its strides toward modernity. Several groups of American minorities also viewed the fair as a chance to gauge and showcase their group's progress. After Susan B. Anthony organized and submitted a petition signed by one hundred prominent women, Congress allowed the fair's national planning commission to name a Board of Lady Managers. (5) Women's involvement in the fair "demonstrated the independent power of women, broadened their appreciation for beauty, heightened their sense of nationalism." (6) Their inclusion "provided women with both a focal point and forum for gauging how far they had advanced and how much further they might go. It also afforded an exemplary view of the achievement of American women." (7)

Despite the inclusion of women in the planning and administration of the fair, however, President Harrison initially refused to appoint blacks to the national planning commission. In addition, the Board of Lady Managers' president, Bertha Palmer, refused black women's requests to serve on the board. (8) Colored People's Day was celebrated on 25 August and showcased African American contributions to American culture and society, including music by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University and poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar. (9) Additionally, three predominantly black colleges and universities, Atlanta University, Hampton Institute, and Wilberforce University, displayed exhibits. Yet blacks were not allowed to have a separate display or building as women were; they were ordered to integrate their exhibits within their states' displays. The paucity of African American exhibits and the exclusion of blacks from the official governing bodies of the fair in the midst of the fair's seeming aura of fraternity and promotion of human welfare prompted Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells to self-publish and distribute the pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition and led Douglass to lament the lack of black representation, which he regarded as an "intentional slight." (10)

The displays in the Woman's Building, however, offered a point of inclusion for African American women and their contributions. Joan Imogene Howard, the only African American manager on the New York Board of Women Managers, created an exhibit of African American women's contributions for display in the Woman's Building. This exhibit "comprised 65 different categories of women's creative productions ranging from the fine arts to the liberal arts to manufactures to horticulture" and "as a statement of women's accomplishments ... shone for the entire race." (11)

The Woman's Building Library included books by six known African American women writers. Among the more than 7,000 volumes were Elleanor Eldridge's Memoirs and Elleanor's Second Book; Julia A.J. Foote's A Brand Plucked from the Fire; Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Moses: A Story of the Nile, Sketches of Southern Life, and Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted; Victoria Earle Matthews's "Aunt Lindy"; H. Cordelia Ray's Sonnets and Sketch of the Life of the Reverend Charles B. Ray (the latter coauthored with Florence T. Ray); and T. T. Purvis's Hagar the Singing Maiden: With Other Stories and Rhymes and Abi Meredith. (12) The one factor that unifies these six authors is their diversity. Their contributions include memoirs, a short story, a novel, a collection of stories and poems, volumes of poetry, and juvenile fiction. From evangelist to entrepreneur, lecturer to lady of leisure, and poet to preacher, these six women represent a diverse spectrum of backgrounds and concerns. Whether their work comments directly on racism, social reform, or "the woman question," taken together these six African American women writers all spoke to the intersections of race and gender that prescribed the black woman's experience in nineteenth-century America and the social and political concerns that motivated her.

Elleanor Eldridge

Elleanor Eldridge is the only one of the six women not to write her own text. Eldridge's Memoirs (1838) represents the life of a free black woman living at the end of the eighteenth century into the mid-nineteenth century. Eldridge's memoir was transcribed by her biographer, Frances Harriet Green. Like many antebellum narratives that feature the stories and histories of African Americans, Eldridge's memoir begins and ends with several appended testimonials. Unlike the testimonials featured in Frederick Douglass's or Harriet Jacobs's narratives, however, the purpose of these was not to prove the authenticity of the text and assuage the doubts that a black person and former slave actually wrote the text. There is no doubt that Elleanor Eldridge did not write her own memoirs and that they were written by a white woman; the frontispiece clearly explains that. The testimonials, then, all written by white women, are not there to authenticate Eldridge's identity and literary ability (Eldridge was nearly illiterate). Their purpose is to portray Eldridge as a woman whose "moral character stands without reproach, fair as the fairest cheek of beauty." (13) Eldridge is characterized as a woman so generous and kind that she subscribed "for papers which she cannot read, in order to promote the circulation of truth, whether moral, or religious" (91). Offered by Rhode Island women who had all hired her at one point or another in various capacities as a spinner, laundress, weaver, or dairy-maker, the testimonials also stress her industry, entrepreneurship, and thrift.

Further, hers is not the narrative of a slave. Eldridge was a second-generation black American. Her grandparents and father were native Africans from Congo and Zaire who engaged to trade with white merchants and were tricked onto a slave ship on the premise of trade and thus enslaved and carried over to the United States. Elleanor's father, Robin Eldridge, and her uncle earned their freedom by fighting in the Revolutionary War. Though promised money, land, and freedom, the Eldridge brothers received only freedom, as they were paid in devalued Continental money. Robin Eldridge married a woman who was African American and Narragansett Indian, and Elleanor and her four siblings were born free in Rhode Island.

Eldridge seemed to inherit the industry and entrepreneurial spirit her grandfather and father both showed upon coming to the New World. One of nine children (five of whom lived), she pursued a life of hard work. Her mother had been a laundress for the Baker family. After Eldridge's mother's death, Elleanor Baker, for whom Eldridge had been named, offered her a job. At the age of ten Eldridge made a contract to hire herself out to the Bakers for one year at the rate of twenty-five cents per week (22). Eldridge's life consisted of many such annual contracts. She offered a variety of services, gaining competence in all of them at an astonishing and accelerated rate. She was praised not only for her skill and the quality of her services but also for the speed with which she developed difficult skills such as spinning and weaving and making cheese, soap, cloth, carpets, and bed ticking. After thirty years of working and saving Eldridge invested her earnings in real estate, which she rented to black tenants. While she was away in Massachusetts for an extended period her real estate, valued at $4,000, was attached and sold by a Mr.--of Warwick to recoup the sum of $240 of an outstanding loan made to Eldridge (83). Green describes the fraud committed against Eldridge as "A WEB OF INIQUITY" and acknowledges that Eldridge's status as a black, uneducated female domestic worker, coupled with her absence, made her a prime candidate for such fraud (90).

The testimonials, then, portray Eldridge in the best…