And why have we not heard of her, along with so many other women of note throughout our history? Well, c’mon, y’all know why*.
Anna Julia Cooper was a scholar, educator, author, sociologist, speaker, and civil and women’s rights leader. Born in 1858 to Hannah Stanley, an enslaved woman held captive in North Carolina in the household of Doctor Fabius J. Haywood. Many scholars conclude that the ‘good doctor’ Heywood was Cooper’s biological father. Not much is known known of her years enslaved in Raleigh. While a student at St. Augustine’s Normal School, however, she was a standout student, including her earning money tutoring her classmates. She also first encountered gender discrimination – being required to take ‘The Ladies Course’, a diminished curriculum by anyone’s measure – at the school, and decided to fight for racial and gender equality equally.
Cooper graduated high school in 1877, enrolled at Oberlin College in 1881, and was only the fourth female to attend. She received a B.A. in mathematics in 1884 and completed a doctorate degree at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1925, only the 4th African American woman to earn her PhD. Cooper was an influential educator, writer, activist and feminist; she was also member of the influential and historic black women’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, an organization of which our current V.P. Kamala Harris is also a member.
“Not the boys less, but the girls more,” Cooper wrote in “A Voice from the South,” published in 1892. Cooper’s topics included education, segregation, women’s suffrage, and the portrayal of African Americans in literature and poverty. The title is considered the ‘first book-length feminist analysis of the condition of African Americans.’ Cooper wrote, ‘Women in stepping from the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in the domestic shrine, and daring to think and move and speak – to undertake to help shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age, are merely completing the circle of the world’s vision.”
Amen to that. Or do I mean – a-woman? 😉