Brigitte Fielder’s “Radical Respectability and African American Women’s Reconstruction Fiction” begins with the serialization of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Sowing and Reaping and then considers additional work by Harper and Julia C. Collins in exploring tensions between radical anti-racism and what has become known as “respectability politics.” Tracing contemporary assumptions about respectability and its limitations in reverse chronology, Fielder asserts that African American women’s Reconstruction fiction did not simply embrace the politics and processes of respectability but often refused respectability’s directionality toward outward approval. Examining concepts of self-respect and self-interest, the chapter highlights moments when texts refuse to prioritize white and/or male characters over Black women’s perspectives – a radical deviation from the usual politics of the respectable. Fielder thus locates the roots of respectability’s critique as more fully present and available to African American women writers of the late nineteenth century than most critics have acknowledged.

Rynetta Davis’s “National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History” considers how nineteenth-century Black women writers contested and revised representations of traditional Black domesticity. Moving outside of the home and beyond traditional forms of domestic work, Elizabeth Keckley, Julia Collins, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper suggest that Black domestic work exceeds the home space. Davis thus examines a range of domestic print practices and sensibilities in ways that highlight gender, gendered spaces and work, and print possibilities surrounding such. In this, her chapter considers just what “domestic” citizenship might look like.

Kathy Glass’s “Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance” highlights social networks, textual politics, and Black resistance and focuses on African Americans’ sustained literary activism against myriad social evils after the Civil War. The chapter begins to map the politics of uplift, temperance, and social reform, with emphasis on work by Julia C. Collins, Harper, and William Wells Brown. Glass suggests these texts underscore literature’s potential for political work by inspiring readers and encouraging collective resistance against oppression.