Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, bodies, gender, motherhood, race, sexuality
Abstract
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) spent at least fifty years in the public eye in several different capacities, including as the first black woman to be appointed to the District of Columbia’s Board of Education, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and as a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A prominent African American woman whose career depended upon her visibility, Terrell was reluctant to reveal much of anything about her private life. In particular, she consistently suppressed information about her health and illnesses, fearing that it might negatively impact her public persona and, thus, opportunities for further speaking engagements or leadership roles in reform organizations. I attempt to make sense of the personal costs (or benefits) associated with Terrell’s illnesses and silence by exploring the painful experiences that she kept hidden from all but her closest family members. Until now, her health problems have been virtually ignored by historians. Yet her illnesses fundamentally shaped her public work and reform priorities. In turn, complex interconnections of race, sex, and class informed Terrell’s responses to her illnesses as well as her concerns about how they might be perceived. Using race and disability studies as theoretical frameworks to examine Mary Church Terrell’s life, this approach enhances the field of disability studies by highlighting the importance of race to our understanding of how a black woman like Terrell coped with illness and disability.
Keywords
African American, biography, disability studies, Mary Church Terrell
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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‘The Picture of Health’: Mary Church Terrell’s Privatizing of Her Body’s Problems
Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) spent at least fifty years in the public eye in several different capacities, including as the first black woman to be appointed to the District of Columbia’s Board of Education, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and as a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. A prominent African American woman whose career depended upon her visibility, Terrell was reluctant to reveal much of anything about her private life. In particular, she consistently suppressed information about her health and illnesses, fearing that it might negatively impact her public persona and, thus, opportunities for further speaking engagements or leadership roles in reform organizations. I attempt to make sense of the personal costs (or benefits) associated with Terrell’s illnesses and silence by exploring the painful experiences that she kept hidden from all but her closest family members. Until now, her health problems have been virtually ignored by historians. Yet her illnesses fundamentally shaped her public work and reform priorities. In turn, complex interconnections of race, sex, and class informed Terrell’s responses to her illnesses as well as her concerns about how they might be perceived. Using race and disability studies as theoretical frameworks to examine Mary Church Terrell’s life, this approach enhances the field of disability studies by highlighting the importance of race to our understanding of how a black woman like Terrell coped with illness and disability.