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"A crusade against the despoiler of virtue": black women, sexual purity, and the gendered politics of the negro problem, 1839-1920.
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Esty, Kaisha. "A crusade against the despoiler of virtue": black women, sexual purity, and the gendered politics of the negro problem, 1839-1920. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-kfxq-4308

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Title"A crusade against the despoiler of virtue": black women, sexual purity, and the gendered politics of the negro problem, 1839-1920.
NameEsty, Kaisha (author); White, Deborah Gray (chair); Bay, Mia E. (co-chair); Satter, Beryl (internal member); Cooper, Brittney C. (internal member); Hendricks, Wanda A. (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2019
Other Date2019-05 (degree)
SubjectAfrican American, History, Women, Black -- Sexual behavior -- Political aspects -- United States -- 19th century, Women, Black -- Sexual behavior -- Political aspects -- United States -- 20th century, African American women -- Sexual behavior -- Political aspects -- 19th century, African American women -- Sexual behavior -- Political aspects -- 20th century, Sex -- Political aspects -- United States
Extent1 online resource (viii, 221 pages) : illustrations
Description“A Crusade Against the Despoiler of Virtue”: Black Women, Sexual Purity, and the Gendered Politics of the Negro Problem, 1839-1920 is a study of the activism of slave, poor, working-class and largely uneducated African American women around their sexuality. Drawing on slave narratives, ex-slave interviews, Civil War court-martials, Congressional testimonies, organizational minutes and conference proceedings, A Crusade takes an intersectional and subaltern approach to the era that has received extreme scholarly attention as the early women’s rights movement to understand the concerns of marginalized women around the sexualized topic of virtue. I argue that enslaved and free black women pioneered a women’s rights framework around sexual autonomy and consent through their radical engagement with the traditionally conservative and racially-exclusionary ideals of chastity and female virtue of the Victorian-era. This is the first full-length project to situate enslaved women within a long tradition of African American women’s struggles for self-defense and sexual self-sovereignty.
This project focuses on the moral imperatives and objectives that governed individual black women’s sexual agency. A Crusade interrogates the ways that black women’s sexual choices represented their aspirational selves. This project treats the question of what the meaning of sex – sexual identity, sexual practices, biological sex and its attendant duties – was in slave, poor, working-class and uneducated black women’s meanings of freedom. Revisiting the concept of chastity, a term that has been largely read as oppressive in feminist scholarship, this project outlines slave, poor and uneducated black women’s weaponization of this ideal for their own liberation. Fundamentally, this a story of the ways that marginalized women have deployed traditionally conservative and racially-exclusionary ideals for means for radical ends.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-kfxq-4308
LanguageEnglish
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
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