284 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900my race.” And her declarations of independence – her insistence, for example, that
she actively enjoys working outside the home for pay – add to our sense that this is
a book that uses literary stereotypes, of race and gender, only to resist and subvert
social ones. The domestic scenes and the eventual destiny of Sappho bring this out
with particular force. While Sappho is at a boarding house, she shares in gatherings
of women at sewing circles and tea parties. What at first appears a commonplace of
domestic fiction, however, turns out to be much more than that. The domestic
sphere was an important site of resistance, at this time, for African-American
women; and the black women’s club movement of the 1890s, which Hopkins is
effectively describing in these scenes, became a powerful collective force for change,
fighting for integration and sexual equality and against racial prejudice and sexual
abuse. The “sewing circle,” as Hopkins presents it, is a political forum whose members
celebrate their solidarity as women and blacks – while discussing such pressing
issues as “the place which the virtuous woman occupies in upbuilding the race.” The
reader is given a rare insight into the lives of African-American bourgeois women
here. More to the point, he or she is also in at the beginnings of a seminal political
movement, permitted to witness meetings that both confirm the dignity and
community of African-American women and interrogate the elaborate machinery
of legal instruments and social prejudice that keeps them down. There is a pungent
realism of attitude at work in these domestic scenes, and implicitly throughout the
book: “The great cause of the evolution of true womanhood,” the narrator quietly
reminds us, would be greatly assisted by “money, the sinews of living and social stand-
ing.” “It is an incontrovertible truth,” one member of the sewing circles acidly observes,
“that there is no such thing as an unmixed black on the American continent.” At her
best, Hopkins uses romance to communicate that realism and to express hope for the
future founded upon it. That is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the fate of
Sappho. Falling in love with the son of her landlady, Will Smith, she fears that her past
will prevent their union and, for a while, runs away. But she is finally reunited with
Will, who recognizes that she is not to blame for her life as a prostitute and is happy
to marry her. The resolution may seem, and indeed is, romantic, even sentimental.
But it presses home the point that woman is the victim, the innocent here. In acknowl-
edging this, and acting on the acknowledgment, Will is a romantic hero making
a realistic judgment of what can happen to women, especially poor, black women, in
a society dominated by men. He is doing what his creator set out to do: as she put it
in her preface to Contending Forces, “pleading for justice of heart and mind.”Writing and the condition of women
Pauline Hopkins tried to write for a living but, much of the time, had to support
herself by working as a stenographer. Writing was also the means that Louisa
M. Alcott (1832–1888) sought to support not only herself but her mother and sisters.
Her father, Bronson Alcott, was more interested in pursuing his utopian ideals than
breadwinning – indeed, he tended to regard working for money as inconsistent with
his Transcendentalist ideals. And Louisa Alcott, who never married, havingGGray_c03.indd 284ray_c 03 .indd 284 8 8/1/2011 7:54:23 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 23 AM