Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform: 1880-1930.

By Patricia A. Schechter. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xx], 386. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4963-0; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2633-2.)

In this detailed and carefully constructed study, Patricia A. Schechter investigates the life of Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) to demonstrate how an active, race-conscious, and religious black woman had a major impact on Progressive-era reform as the leader of a "crusade for justice" for African Americans, especially women. Wells-Barnett rose to prominence during a period of intense activism by women, when African American women in particular exercised a spiritually derived mandate for uplift, education, and community-building outside the confines of home and church. Metaphorically, these women were sailing on a ship, trying to traverse the dangerously raging seas of Jim Crow laws, segregation, and lynching to land ashore and improve race relations and justice for all.

Schechter traces the story of a courageous and outspoken African American woman who constructed a writer's persona under the pen name "Exiled" and conducted her crusade through lectures and newspaper articles in the face of innumerable odds. Wells-Barnett was a public speaker and teacher before she took to the podium to denounce lynching. Like Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth, she called on the power of written and spoken language and lived by faith. Schechter maintains that "Wells-Barnett's efforts ... [reveal] a life that embodied not suspension but movement, not inhibition but 'talking back.'" Challenging conventional gender norms, Wells-Barnett refused "to be confined as a proper lady or ... lightly dismissed as a rebel girl" (p. 2). A combination of boldness and vulnerability enabled her to mobilize African American women for mutual support and inscribe standards of feminine behavior under the rubric of racial improvement, middle-class respectability, and dignified womanhood. Schechter describes Wells-Barnett as a "visionary pragmatist": she was "visionary" insofar as her faith demonstrated an ideological kinship with "prophetic traditions in African American religion"; and her "pragmatism" found its source in "the intellectual ferment of turn-of-the-century Chicago as well as ... black women's legacy of 'making a way out of no way' ..." (p. 3).

Schechter points out that "[a]lthough [Wells-Barnett] was initially celebrated as a religious heroine--a 'modern Joan of the race'--negative reactions to a black woman moving out of her 'place' soon precipitated a shift in gender expectations for African American women in organized reform" (p. 4). Leadership positions for African American women became rare after the turn of the century. Wells-Barnett found that she and her vision of social change were increasingly "marginalized" by the professionals (mainly college-degreed men) associated with the newly founded NAACP, especially in the ongoing fight against lynching (p. 4).

Schechter has written a challenging account of Ida B. Wells-Barnett that emphasizes her role in social reform and race relations. This historical biography of Wells-Barnett's accomplishments and frustrations provides new perspectives on the "age of reform" in the United States, and it does so without romanticizing the era. Schechter's work thus complements books by Deborah Gray White, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and Glenda E. Gilmore that also emphasize the important role played by women in the major political and social changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

FLORIS BARNETT CASH
State University of New York at Stony Brook