“Halls Which Are Everywhere Denied Us”: Using Archival Research to Recover African American Feminist Media Activism

This article investigates the public activism of TheWoman’s Era newspaper (1894–97), which was one of the first African American feminist periodicals to derive national circulation in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Considering TheWoman’s Era’s coverage of activist efforts to build African American public reading rooms and libraries, this article suggests that African American feminist writers and editors, such as Florida R. Ridley and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, sought to revise the concept of the public sphere by broadening who had access to public space and altering how blackness was represented within these spaces. This article draws from archival work derived from Emory University’s Emory Women Writers Resource Project in collaboration with the Lewis H. Beck Center at Woodruff Library and the Virtual Library Project, which offers transcribed reproductions of TheWoman’s Era and includes downloadable images of individual pages and advertisements. Given the scope of such research, which attempts to read African American women’s public writing through a rhetorical and close-textual lens, Emory University’s digital archives provide a valuable frame of reference for charting the currency of specific terms, such as “public space,” “public interest,” “public opinion,” and “public good.” The goal of this project is to offer a discursive interpretation of how appeals to “the public” as both a material and a conceptual space denoting citizen rights and resources was used and deployed by African American feminist activists for the purposes of uplifting minority communities and developing African American women’s voices.