Question 1

What does “race woman” mean?

Accepted Answer

a Black woman who made the advancement of Black people her public life's work

Question 2

Where does “race woman” come from?

Accepted Answer

Black America, from the post-Reconstruction decades onward, in the world of the Black women's club movement, the Black press and the Black churches — Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Nannie Helen Burroughs are the prototypes. Shirley J. Carlson, writing in The Journal of Negro History in 1992 on Black ideals of womanhood in the late Victorian era, describes the woman a community applauded as a race woman: intelligent, well educated, carrying a strong community and racial consciousness in her work, paid or unpaid, and held up as a model for the young. The term sits beside race man, the social type St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton anatomized in Black Metropolis in 1945; Hazel Carby's Race Men argues that the male construct crowded the women out, which is part of why the female term needs keeping. Gerald Horne titled his 2000 biography of Shirley Graham Du Bois Race Woman, which is evidence enough that the term is live scholarly vocabulary. One warning about sources: the definition circulating on study guides and forums, about a loyal member of the race who is consistently confrontational with anything that threatens Black well-being, traces to a message board post from 2011, not to any scholar.