Cooper's Connection to Black Feminism

Although Anna Cooper wrote well before "Black Feminism" became a part of feminist discourse, I was not surprised at all when Professor Graban mentioned that she has been sited as an important root system to Black Feminism's development. While Cooper's piece can first be aligned with a Black Feminist critique because she is advocating that black women's voices finally be heard or made present in literature, she might further be identified as an important foundation for the Black Feminist movement because of her resistance to fractioning the black women's voice from her male counterpart:

"One muffled strain in the Silent South, a jarring chord and a vague and uncomprehended cadenza has been and still is the Negro. And of that muffled chord, the one mute and voiceless note has been the sadly expectant Black Woman" (Cooper 379). Although as I will reiterate that Cooper is writing from a time before the term "Black Feminism" was coined, I find it interesting how similarly the Black Feminist movement to come would shape their argument like Coopers. First speaking out against black women's oppression within the category of race, and then their further dismissal on account of their sex.

Throughout Cooper's article she discusses the need for black women's voices within her anger toward the injustices that faced black men in literature. Perhaps this was only due to the amount of evidence available to Cooper because, as she pointed out, the black women's voice in literature was practically invisible, but I would suggests that Cooper, like her feminist sisters to come, saw fractionalization as disadvantageous to her cause. So, instead Cooper spoke of the need for a black and female voice within her argument for more fair representation and opportunities for blacks in literature, "The fact is, a sense of freedom in mind as well as in body is necessary to the appreciative and inspiring pursuit of the beautiful" (Cooper 382).

To compare this organization of Cooper's argument with the future Black Feminist discussion to come, I have found a quote from the Combahee River Collective's "A Black Feminist Statement," one of the first of its kind which neatly echos Cooper's resistance to separate the black women's voice from the black voice, although I am not suggesting this was a necessarily conscious effort on Cooper's part:

"We also often fine it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously... We feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black People necessitates solidarity around the fact of race" (Combahee River Collective 213).

This analytical frame although not historically accurate because Cooper well proceeded Black feminist discourse, provides an important stepping stone in understanding where black female voices have always been speaking from: a space doubly oppressed by racial and sexual discrimination.