“A Colored Woman in a White World”: The Intersectional Perspective of Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) spent at least fifty years as an activist in several different capacities including as the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Throughout her life, Terrell directly attacked the legal and social institutions that perpetuated racism and sexism in America. This paper helps move intersectionality from the realm of dominant interdisciplinary theory to empirical historical research. Terrell saw black women’s status as unique, repeatedly pointing to the interconnections of race and gender: “A white woman has only one handicap to overcome–that of sex.  I have two–both sex and race. I belong to the only group in the country which has two such huge obstacles to surmount.  Colored men have only one–that of race.”  Yet she denied an easy or universal sisterhood with white women by calling attention to the difference that race made in black women’s lives. Terrell bluntly told white women: ”I assure you that nowhere in the United States have my feelings been so lacerated, my spirit so crushed, my heart so wounded, nowhere have I been so humiliated and handicapped on account of my sex as I have been on account of my race.” For Terrell, women’s rights were always linked to improved civil rights for her race. Because they were all vulnerable to attempts to keep them from the polls, for instance, Terrell argued that black men should be women’s best allies in the fight for full citizenship. In this paper, I consider questions of voice and resistance so central to intersectional theory while illuminating the contested and shifting meanings of race and gender through an analysis of Mary Church Terrell’s writings.