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Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. By EVELYN BROOKS HIGGINBOTHAM. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993. xii + 306 pp. $34.95.
Making her position clear at the outset, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham claims the church is "the most powerful institution of racial self-help in the African American community" (p. 1). The church also provided a forum for women to challenge their subordination. Women articulated a biblical basis for women's rights which included the demand for suffrage. (Their feminist vision was limited, however, since no church women protested the fact that only men could be ordained or hold positions of authority in their denominational structure.)
Utilizing the lenses of race, gender and class consciousness, Brooks Higginbotham examines the work of women among three groups which merged to become the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A. in 1895. Organized in autonomous Women's Conventions, first at...