Black Baptist women’s activism worked gradually and subversively, not through dramatic revolt

Evidence

In the final analysis the women’s movement in the black Baptist church may be likened more to Harriet Tubman’s repeated, surreptitious efforts to lead slaves step by step away from bondage than to Nat Turner’s apocalyptic, revolutionary surge. Women’s efforts were valiant attempts to navigate their people through the stifling and dangerous obstacle course of American racism. … But the women’s movement did something more. It gave to black women an individual and group pride that resisted ideologies and institutions upholding gender subordination. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 113

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: A separate women’s body allowed black Baptist women to speak for themselves, not men. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 689; Black women shaped collective sentiment through their two-thirds majority in the Baptist movement — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 63; Black Baptist women mobilized a politics of respectability as resistance to consumer capitalism. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 954 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Black Baptist women strategically mixed war and domestic imagery to justify public activism #exemplifies (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 670