Alison M. Parker

In Unceasing Militant: The Life of Mary Church Terrell, Dr. Alison M. Parker writes, “Over her long life, Mollie Church Terrell’s range of activism and alliances was extraordinary, and yet she has never before been the subject of a full-length scholarly biography” (pg. 2). Parker works to rectify that gap in the historiography. Parker argues, “Terrell always approached the problems confronting African Americans and women from a number of angles at once, and her varied activities demonstrate her indefatigable energy as well as the value she placed on participating in multiple overlapping reform groups to achieve her goals of equality and justice for all” (pg. 2). Intersectionality guides Parker’s analysis of Terrell’s life throughout her biography.

Discussing healthcare and women’s rights, Parker writes, “[Terrell’s] public stance on such issues as African American women’s access to health care and the care and education of their children were deeply informed by her private experiences” (pg. 42). She continues, “Mollie Terrell intuitively reached for what many epigeneticists now understand – that the trauma of racism and racist violence can have a negative effect on the mental and physical development of black women’s unborn children… For African American parents, then as now, high aspirations for their children were always counterbalanced by the painful knowledge that, regardless of class or accomplishment, they confronted hurdles and dangers that white children did not have to face” (pgs. 46-47). Parker breaks down Terrell’s intersectional approach into three components: “First, Terrell repeatedly asserted black women’s full citizenship and right to vote… Second, from the late 1890s through the 1910s, Terrell’s speeches against the myth of white women’s purity versus black women’s alleged impurity became more high stakes and person as she raised two African American daughters… And third, thinking of the histories of her own enslaved grandmothers and mother, Terrell rejected the spread of revisionist histories that maligned Reconstruction while enshrining the antebellum era as a better, more harmonious time” (pg. 122).

Parker further works to dismantle the mythologized version of events surrounding the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, D.C. She writes, “It is not surprising that historians and stories in popular culture have gravitated to a simplistic story with a clear narrative arc and one heroine – the story that only Ida B. Wells-Barnett defied the segregation strictures while all others capitulated – but it is not accurate. When they took their rightful places throughout the parade, Terrell and the other African American suffragists acted with assurance, pride, and determination” (pg. 127). In addition to this, Parker’s discussion of the rise of progressivism and its compromises to white supremacy, coupled with the split of the GOP ticket at a time when the Party of Lincoln still worked with African American voters, helps to deepen the reader’s understanding of the Progressive Era and its conflicted ideologies (pgs. 145-146). Terrell’s experience further illuminates the history of the New Deal. Parker writes, “Segregation and prejudice in state-level administrations and in the distribution of New Deal programs is well documented, but there are fewer accounts of how black employees experienced discrimination in government agencies in the nation’s capital. Terrell’s seven-month sojourn there in 1934 illuminates one black woman’s personal perspective on her New Deal work experience” (pg. 201). Opportunities for black women were few and far between in the New Deal era. Parker writes, “Fifteen years after having worked for the government during World War I, she found that African Americans were still not welcome in federal agencies. White women frequently protested working with black women, reflecting prejudice and fears that their own purity and respectability, sexual and racial, might be diminished by proximity to black women in integrated workrooms, restrooms, and cafeterias” (pg. 207).

Terrell’s commitment to the Party of Lincoln became ever more complicated amid the changes during the New Deal era. Though she did not support President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s catering to southern segregationists, she could no longer drum up solid support for Republican candidates. Further, “National white GOP leaders took a hard look at the shift of African American voters to the Democratic Party in the 1914 midterm elections and calculated that they had little to gain from wooing black voters” (pg. 229). The Cold War only further cemented the break between black voters and the GOP. Parker writes, “In Cold War America, all activists – communist or not – were charged with subversion simply for advocating civil rights, taking an anti-imperialist stance, or working with communists or leftist activists. In a speech to a peace organization, Terrell supported anticolonial freedom struggles worldwide and condemned the U.S. government for using anticommunism to suppress black Americans’ calls for civil rights” (pg. 269). Terrell called out this change in a speech to the United Nations, which she hoped would have greater influence than its forebear, the League of Nations.

Parker concludes, “Just as Rosa Parks’s activist life was far longer and more complex than the one moment when she sat down on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, so Mollie Church Terrell cannot be defined by one or two moments, whether it be her presidency of the National Association of Colored Women or her desegregation win in the U.S. Supreme Court. From the 1890s through the 1950s, Terrell had a complicated, multilayered life and approach to activism, pressing continuously for full equality and justice” (pg. 292). Parker’s Unceasing Militant is a brilliant work of scholarship and an invaluable resource to those seeking to learn more about the long civil rights struggle, particularly from an intersectional approach. Though an academic work, Parker writes in a style that any reader of biography can easily follow with judicious notes to document her research and expand on ideas. A must-read at this critical juncture in history where the importance of intersectionality is all the more pressing.… (mehr)

In Purifying America: Women, Cultural Reform, and Pro-Censorship Activism, 1873-1933, Alison M. Parker argues, “From 1873 through the 1930s… censorship was popularly viewed as a useful tool for social change,” leading her to explore “the advocacy of censorship as a popular reform and the social conditions whereby this movement was transformed and expanded into a debate about the regulation of society’s morals and the content of American culture” (pg. 1). She juxtaposes the activities of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union with the American Library Association, demonstrating that censorship activities were not solely exclusionary, but rather featured an element of cultural promotion to foster cultural consumption habits that moral guardians found favorable. Parker responds to Paul Boyer’s Purity in Print and Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow to complicate the historiography of censorship and show how censors viewed their work as promotional rather than restrictive as well as fostering an avenue for feminist political action prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Parker demonstrates that the belief in children’s learning through mimicry was crucial to the censors’ justifications for the removal of “impure” materials (pg. 22-24). She writes, “The censorship activities of the [WCTU’s] Department of Purity in Literature and Art were regularly presented in a language that stressed women’s responsibilities to children and domesticity” (pg. 26). Further, “The WCTU’s public fight for literary censorship emphasized the need for its members to work as mothers or nurturing women for the morals of all youths, including immigrant and working-class children” (pg. 52). Turning to the ALA, Parker writes, “Increased attention to the role and ideas of children’s librarians significantly alters the evaluation of the American Library Association’s similarities to moral reform groups in the Progressive Era by demonstrating how librarians employed arguments about the morally impressionable nature of youths. The moral guardianship of youths became a site of cultural struggle between professionals and laypeople, and the censorship and regulation of books inside libraries became librarians’ primary means of control” (pg. 77).

Complicating Levine’s duology of high and low art, Parker argues “that significant portions of the middle classes were uncomfortably positioned between these two notions of culture that were promoted at the turn of the century. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union exemplifies the ambiguous position of the middle classes vis-à-vis the ‘sacralization’ of culture, for it fought against high art as well as against popular culture” (pg. 112). She continues, “In focusing upon youth, the WCTU was putting on its traditional maternal mantle as protector of children, displaying a tangle of gender, ethnic, and class concerns and was legitimizing women’s participation in the political public sphere” (pg. 140). When specifically discussing film censorship, which the WCTU advocated with gusto, Parker writes, “The [WCTU’s] Department of Motion Pictures organized its pro-censorship fight around an attack on the motion picture industry’s purported predominance in American popular culture, in effect, its cultural hegemony” (pg. 146).

Discussing the WCTU’s efforts to create alternative forms of literature and film while simultaneously suppressing what they considered “impure,” Parker writes, “Its emphasis on the creation of ‘pure’ culture distinguished the WCTU from other reformers, including the male vice societies that worked exclusively for censorship” (pg. 157). She continues, “Support for censorship is usually seen as wholly repressive, yet those groups that supported regulation were actively engaged in reworking the available media and in creating their own ‘pure’ culture. Both the American Library Association and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union accompanied their support for the regulation of ‘impure’ reading and art with programs to promote or produce ‘pure’ culture” (pg. 195). Parker concludes, “By choosing to censor culture rather than politics, reformers avoided most charges of inhibiting or restricting free speech, particularly since commercial entertainments were not then guaranteed protection by the courts under the First Amendment… The pro-censorship movement thus melded women’s increasing interest in participating in the political sphere with their strong identification of themselves as maternal/nurturing beings” (pg. 224). Her work offers an invaluable contribution to the historiography of censorship as she demonstrates how censors welded Progressive Era ideals with their programs in order to promote behaviors based on the emerging social sciences rather than simply working to restrict certain forms of culture.… (mehr)