Because of the heavy influence of Evangelical Christianity, and the centrality of Christian churches to African American cultural formation, the Bible is in many ways not only a touchstone for African American culture, but quite simply its Rosetta stone. My interest in this project grew from my desire to understand the ways that black people (and particularly black women) read and interpreted the Bible, and the ways that those interpretations shaped broader society. I have chosen to focus upon the years between 1820 and 1920 because that period is a particularly important one in African American history. They saw sweeping changes in the condition of black people in America, central to which was the struggle for and eventual attainment of emancipation from slavery. Those years also represents a time of unprecedented institutional formation as black schools and colleges were built, businesses and benevolent societies were formed, and churches and denominations stretched and evolved in response to the needs of an emerging, changing, and increasingly urban and northern population.

This dissertation involves making a close examination of the biblical hermeneutics of four important African American women whose lives span the nineteenth century: Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Julia Foote and Anna Julia Cooper. Lee and Foote were itinerant evangelists; Stewart and Cooper were political activists. Each used the Bible extensively in her public speeches and writing. The intent of the dissertation is to focus upon these women’s particular use of the Bible to refute racism and sexism, and to construct a kind of proto-womanist theology and self-understanding that served as a powerful tool to begin carving a niche for themselves in a hostile time and contested public space. My thesis is that these women used biblical exegesis as a means of countering racism and sexism in the church and wider community, of explaining their emergence in to the public sphere, and of constructing a positive self-understanding in the face of the double-jeopardy they endured as African-Americans and as women. In the course of the dissertation, I examine the biblical hermeneutics of Lee, Stewart, Foote and Cooper with an eye towards deciphering the ways in which their discourse functions on multiple levels, some of which focus particularly on their personal experiences as black women.