“The Courteous Tongue of France”: Modernity and Womanhood in “Colored” America

This paper explores the social, cultural, political and educational climate that made francophilia central to the world of educated African American women in the late 19th century. I argue that a group of educated Black American women, including Mary Church Terrell, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida Gibbs Hunt and Fannie Barrier Williams, used their knowledge of Frenchness and the French language in their process of self-fashioning and identity-building as modern political subjects. Educated African American women were not only familiar with French as a language; they were also interacting with France as an idea, a place of culture and history, and a lived environment. This paper shows that African American women’s access to education and the development of a class of “Colored” activists-intellectuals in the postbellum era created the conditions necessary for multilingualism; I focus in particular on the training of Terrell, Hunt and Cooper and their experiences after graduating from Oberlin College (1884.) Secondly, I show that African American women’s francophilia was part of a broader trend dating back to the early 1800s by which Americans of African descent were drawing connections to France as a land of liberty and racial inclusion. Finally, African American women’s engagement with Frenchness was part and parcel of an intellectual and political project to defi ne modern Black womanhood in the late 19th century. This paper focuses for instance on African American women’s attendance at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889 to explore the development of ideas around modern black subjects and the project of Empire. Overall, French language-learning was part of a broad intellectual project in the midst of Jim Crow America, through which women of African descent challenged racist expectations of their “inferiority” and supposed lack of morality, while embracing a vision of the “Old World” as culturally and artistically superior.