Anna Julia Cooper, born enslaved and later one of the first Black women in America to earn a doctorate, wrote this 1892 essay collection arguing that the progress of a people can be measured by the status of its women, and that Black women’s voices had been left out of every conversation about race that mattered.
Decades ahead of its time, A Voice from the South remains a founding text of Black feminist thought, sharp, scholarly and unwilling to wait its turn.
