With the 1987 publication of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Black American Woman Novelist Hazel Carby produced a groundbreaking cultural history of nineteenth-century African American women, and an unapologetic black feminist intervention. The work proved that literature was itself a key site for the development of cultural and political ideas that would come to dominate later thinking.

The women whose lives and work are here documented, celebrated, and commemorated refused to be intimidated or silenced by a nation that sought to exploit their labor and reproductive power, and to deny their humanity. Reconstructing Womanhood proved an excoriating critique of the era's focus on “great men” in African American literary and cultural criticism that obscured the work of their female contemporaries. It revised the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of fervent cultural and political activity by such figures as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins.

With updated text and a new preface by the author, an introduction by Sarah Haley, and afterword by Robert Reid Pharr, the book remains as impactful today as it was in 1987, ready for a new generation of scholars and thinkers.

Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emerita of African American Studies and Professor Emerita of American Studies at Yale University.