Black women’s schools made domestic refinement the special burden of their students
Evidence
Despite the much lower income level of their students, black schools preached the gospel of manners and morals and charged women with the special mission of promoting clean and cultured homes. In 1886 the white teacher Belle Pettigrew of Shaw University in Raleigh typified this philosophy when she stated: “I want my girls to feel that it is possible, while engaged in daily toil and in poverty even, to exalt home life into a thing of beauty.” A letter from E. B. Battey to the Two Republics, a daily newspaper published in Mexico City, praised Spelman women for exhibiting table manners no different from those of Vassar and Wellesley women. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 166
Categorization
- XREF: This directly instantiates the politics of respectability the book coins — black women trained to display manners proving them the equals of white college women. — connects to: Black leaders justified women’s education by framing mothers as bearers of social caste. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 131; Educating elite black women was deemed essential to spreading correct values — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 156; Black Baptist women saw their domestic teaching role as decisive for racial uplift — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 388 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Black Baptist women saw their domestic teaching role as decisive for racial uplift
#corroborates(0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 388 - Educating elite black women was deemed essential to spreading correct values
#corroborates(0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 156 - Black women embraced domestic training partly to counter stereotypes of promiscuity.
#qualifies(0.74) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 473