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Edythe Mae Gordon. Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton. Intro. Lorraine Elena Roses. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.129 pp. $25.00.
Add the voice of Edythe Mae Gordon to those of Elise Johnson McDougald, Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Florynce Kennedy, Claudia Jones, Frances Beale, Deborah K. King, Gloria Wade Gayles, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and a number of other writers and thinkers who have engaged the feminist project of articulating the unique situation of African American women vis-avis a racist, sexist, and classist society. Sandwiched between three short stories and thirteen poems, Gordon's 1935 thesis for the Master's degree in Social Services from Boston University makes up the bulk of Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon. In it Gordon utilizes the categories of race and gender to explore the legal, social, religious, economic, and educational status of African American women. Lorraine Elena Roses points out in the introduction to the volume that one senses in reading "The Status of the Negro Woman in the United States from 1619-1865" that Gordon was acutely aware of the pioneering nature of her work. The thesis provides a useful colony-by-colony, state-by-state analysis of how governments functioned, with particular reference to laws relating to slavery. Gordon's meticulous exploration of legal cases and constitutional law "exposes slavery and its sequel, institutionalized racism, as peculiar social constructs." She offers original insight and analysis regarding the evolution of race relations from colonial times, including intriguing data about black slaveholders, interracial liaisons, and the socioeconomic status of poor whites. Personal testimony and other source materials, such as want-ads from eighteenth-century periodicals advertising black women for sale, add authenticity. Gordon sometimes too willingly conflates the experiences of black women with those of black men, and at times minor problems of coherence surface in the text; but the overall value of the thesis far exceeds these minor flaws, some of which might have been remedied by more diligent and informed oversight from her thesis advisor.
Born Edythe Mae Chapman in 1896, Gordon received her secondary schooling in Washington, D.C., at the prestigious M Street School, which boasted faculty members Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Gordon's life, as Roses presents it, is intriguing....