Week 4

Lately, I found myself attracted to the field of women’s studies and want to learn more about talented and empowered women of the past and present times. So, I choose to learn about Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Her life and writing career have really been inspiring. Alice was among the first generation of African Americans born free in New Orleans after the American Civil War. She graduated from Straight University in 1892, a time when fewer than 1% of Americans went to college, and then became a teacher in New Orleans’ public school system. She worked tirelessly, writing in genres that were not popular at her time, such as diaries and journalistic essays. Her mixed-race heritage of African American, Anglo, Native American, and Creole gave her deep insight into tangled problems of gender, race, and ethnicity. All her life she struggles with her ability to pass as white, but she also confirms her inability to control how some black people viewed her.  Due to the light shade of her skin, other blacks sometimes perceived her as an elitist.  Although Alice Dunbar-Nelson struggled with acceptance within the black community, she spent her life, as a writer, teacher, public speaker, and activist, fighting for racial and gender justice.

Reading through the offered poems, I cannot find the drama of the racist oppression and social injustice of African American. However, those poems scream about her own struggles and longing to achieve greatness and be something more than she could, given her life circumstances. Her famous poem ‘I Sit and Sew’ clearly illustrates her feelings. Written just after WWI, it compares the violence of war, its “holocaust of hell” where soldiers “lie in sodden mud and rain”—with a boring and suffocating domestic life of a woman dreaming beneath a “homely thatch.” The speaker feels more and more useless and powerless until she can think no more but only scream in anguish because her meaningless life become unbearable, stifling, and “futile.” Her other poem ‘To Madam Curie’ echoes the same state of the soul which is not content with what she is but wanted to be more and achieve greatness like the famous women of the past. “Oft have I thrilled at deeds of high emprise, And yearned to venture into realms unknown, Thrice blessed she, I deemed, whom God had shown How to achieve great deeds in woman’s guise.” She too wishes to become like Madame Curie. She desires to be greater than Joan of Arc or Sappho of Lesbos.” So would I be this woman whom the world Avows its benefactor; nobler far, Than Sybil, Joan, Sappho, or Egypt’s queen.” She wants the world to depend on her as it did on Curie.

I believe all those wishes and desires to do something good and great in her life compelled her to grow out of timidity and desperation, to become a fighter. Among her many accomplishments (aside from the literary work) were the co-founding of a mission in Harlem to help young women transition from the American South states to New York, deep involvement in the women’s suffrage movement, support for anti-lynching legislation, and life-long commitment to education for people of color.