When I first read Carby's title, my mind flashed immediately to speaker Sojourner Truth's famous line at the 1851 Women's Rights Convention: "Ain't I a woman?" Truth sought recognition of her womanhood not based on any biological question of her sex, but because as a black woman in nineteenth-century America, she was locked out of the ideologies that shaped the category "woman." Hazel Carby's book Reconstructing Womanhood envelops Truth's observations about the construction of gendered and racialized womanhood in its larger project, which rethinks the canonical line about the development of African-American women writers.

Carby's tightly packed introduction outlines her four main claims. She states her intention to dissect the domestic ideology of nineteenth-century womanhood and its effect upon white and black females. She takes a stance against the existence of widespread interracial "sisterhood," arguing that although individual white women may have aided black women to edit or publish texts, the larger ideology of womanhood placed constraints of race before those of gender, aligning white women with a "racist patriarchal order" that excluded black females (6). In order to conquer this divide, Carby asserts that black women authors wrote explicitly political texts that tried to sensitize their audiences to their exclusion from the traditional womanhood, and that they used the privileged position of "women" to advocate for social change. Lastly, Carby hopes to show that these black women writers, often neglected, are part of a historically resonant "black woman's renaissance" (a term she feels has only gained credence in the 1970's - present recognition of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and other contemporaries).

Carby opens with a discussion of womanhood modeled upon the so-called "cult of true womanhood," a cultural institution created and reinforced in the nineteenth century by guidebooks, education, and social practices. The virtues of purity, piety, submissiveness and domesticity were key to the construction of the white female; Carby argues that the white woman's image was strengthened by having a defined opposite in the construction of black female sexuality. Where white women were figured as soft, delicate, sexless and glorified in their motherhood, black women were harnessed to an image of brute strength, vulgarity, relentless lust, and a conception as "breeders" who possessed no ties to their children. "Womanhood" constructed an angel in the house and a dark double, which dampened feelings of sisterhood between black and white women.

Carby uses the trope of institutionalized rape as a representative nexus of ideologies confronting black women's attempt to utilize "womanhood." Slave rape perpetrated by white males often led to children, which figured the slave woman as "breeder" and not as glorified mother. The act's sexual aggression was socially transferred onto the lustful slave woman, pitting her against the cult of true womanhood's ideal of purity and also creating a fissure between the slave woman and the white mistress, who could transfer her humiliation and anger onto the black woman. And rape also policed the black community, both by emasculating the black father and husband, and by becoming a political weapon for the lynching of black men.

Surviving rape at all, of course, goes against the sentimental grain of true womanhood, in which death was preferable to dishonor. Yet black female writers underwent assault - physical and mental - and lived to pass on the experience in their writings. Carby begins her study with Harriet Jacobs's Narrative of the Life of a Slave Girl, in which the ex-slave maintains that the standards of womanhood demanded of white females do not apply to the daily lives of their black counterparts. Jacobs articulates the idea that beauty, the crowning glory of white womanhood, degrades the black slave by placing her in a sexually vulnerable position. She assumes the speaking position of "mother," a cornerstone of white women's ideology, though she should be locked out from that position as a "breeder" with no parental claims, and as an unmarried woman claiming a mother's sphere. Jacobs also critiques interracial sisterhood, employing the trope of blood sisters to explore the different - and often antagonistic - lives that black and white girls raised together went on to lead. Jacobs' text provides a solid introduction to the discourse of black womanhood and its standing in a slave society.

The threads of Jacobs' politics were picked up in a fictional mode by Frances Harper. Harper's fictions trace strong black heroines who eschew the mode of sentimentality, surviving their hardships. Carby investigates the ways in which Harper grafts the sentimental woman, the pure leader of the home and nation, onto black characters for moral and political effect. She's also interested in Harper's musings on the need for black women to politically lead their race. Carby is anxious to reclaim Frances Harper's literary status in the canon, and she deems Harper's books political weapons which are meant to "morally rearm" the black intellectual (94).

The politics of black womanhood become even more articulated through the speeches and writings of activists Ida B. Wells and Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, who focused upon the need for black women's education and the exclusionary tactics of "sister" white feminist organizations. There is a historical shift in thinking by this point; the impossibly angelic idea of "womanhood" is beginning to come under assault for all colors of women in Cooper's writings. She remains particularly concerned with black women's status, however, anxious that black women's attempts to fit into the mold of traditional passive womanhood might discourage them from seeking an intellectual education. Wells and Cooper situated themselves as black women affected by race, gender, and increasingly class as well (Carby devotes some time to the growth of the black middle and upper classes and their problematic interaction with more rural counterparts). These thoughts were carried on by lecturer-writer Pauline Hopkins; Carby carefully demonstrates how Hopkins proudly identified herself in lectures as both African- American and a woman. Hopkins employed the mode of fiction but had a determined agenda to tackle the issues of slavery and race prejudice. She often used the figure of the mulatto to show the tangled skeins between blacks and whites; that "tragic" mulatto usually eschewed her traditional fate, death, and often brought racial groups together from her position as a black woman.

Reconstructing Womanhood ends on a note which asks us to recenter African-American literary history in favor of these women writers. Carby argues that the shadow of the Harlem Renaissance has loomed too large over the conception of black literary productivity. She resents critics who have canonized black women writers with a more "natural" style that privileges "the folk." Rather than take Zora Neale Hurston's work as the defining text of black female experience, Carby would have us examine the legacy of black women urban intellectuals, whom she places in a continuum which includes Harlem writers Nella Larsen and Jessie Fauset right up to Toni Morrison.

Carby's presentation of an alternative canon line for African-American female writers is powerful, perhaps too much so to squeeze into her concluding chapter. She stresses the urbanity, intellectual approach and political awareness of her subjects throughout the text, but it isn't clear who she's contrasting this with until the final chapter; a more explicit explanation of the need to revalue this particular authorial line would have been valuable in the beginning. Then again, any book which attempts to support four theses at once has got quite enough material in the opening chapter. Reconstructing Womanhood holds up its weight for the most part; the text follows a natural progression from early slave narratives' peeling away of the competing ideologies of black and white womanhood, to more subtle Reconstruction writings that employed the discourse of sentimental fiction to show what was, was not, and should have been possible as a black woman in America. The book does have a tendency to veer from ideology to literary analysis as it progresses; I would have enjoyed more attention to the craft of Jacob's text, as well as Carby's reaction to the modernity of claiming Jacobs as "the" black female literary foremother; her book suggests a seamless line between Jacobs and later writers when in fact Jacobs was fairly obscure for quite some time.

Carby's other main claim, the dissection of an illusory sisterhood between black and white women holds firm throughout the book as well but often seems subordinate to her discussion of restructuring the canon and dismantling the ideologies of womanhood. Yet all in all, Reconstructing Womanhood juggles literary history and identity politics with aplomb. The text does not universalize; it speaks from the position of a marginalized group that faces specific problems from their racial and their gendered status. The problems of Jacobs and her successors might bear some similarities to the patriarchal oppression experienced by Charlotte Gilman's protagonist in "The Yellow Wallpaper," but they have an added racial dimension. These women don't want Walt Whitman's all-encompassing "American" voice to sweep them under its great mantle. Carby illustrates the political specificity of all of these writings, both in the context of a greater American literature, and within the Afro-American canon. Her argument made me rethink my own periodization of African-American literary history. Reconstructing Womanhood led me to realize that much as I prize reading Morrison, Naylor and their contemporaries, much work had to be done to illuminate the current spotlight of the black women writer's renaissance. Carby's writers are the people who fill in the historical gap, forcing themselves into the dominant literary discourse but being forgotten along the way. She makes a cogent argument that we should rediscover the power - political and literary - of these women who first answered Sojourner Truth's question by saying "Yes, I am a woman - world, here's why."