A separate women’s body allowed black Baptist women to speak for themselves, not men.

Evidence

The records and pronouncements of the Woman’s Convention, on the other hand, did not purport to speak for men. Through the Woman’s Convention, the female membership of the NBC articulated its own values and concerns. The WC constituted a new discursive realm in which women’s voices were neither silent nor subordinate to men’s. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 689

Categorization

• DEFINE: Useful as concrete scaffolding for how the politics-of-respectability project required an autonomous discursive space to even articulate its demands.
• XREF: connects to: Black Baptist women read middle-class propriety as a demand for full inclusion, not submission. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 457; Separate female institutions gave black Baptist women greater authority — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 389; Black Baptist women guarded their institutional autonomy against male intrusion — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 363 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Separate female institutions gave black Baptist women greater authority #expands (0.95) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 389
• Black Baptist women guarded their institutional autonomy against male intrusion #expands (0.85) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 363
• For black Baptist women, race consciousness actively promoted rather than suppressed gender empowerment. #expands (0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 764
• Black Baptist women held a double consciousness of simultaneous separateness and alliance #qualifies (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 390
• Black Baptist women’s activism worked gradually and subversively, not through dramatic revolt #complicates (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 113