"Just One Kind" of Southern Womanist Aesthetics: Ways Rural Black Women Established and Practiced a Culture of Self-Empowerment in the pre-Civil Rights South

In much of the scholarship concerning American women, an overwhelming amount of attention has been given to middle- and upper-class women, especially White women. While White women’s notions of womanhood have occupied tremendous intellectual space, middle-class urban Black women have garnished the majority of consideration within studies associated with Black women’s lives. Emphasis on middle-class Black women is centered on club work and racial uplift through their work in education, church activities, and political activism. Contrastly, Black women who lived in rural spaces have received less attention. Scholars have focused primarily on issues related to labor and work that rural poor women performed domestically and agriculturally. Moreover, writers, such as Richard Wright and William Faulkner, have portrayed aspects of Black life in such rural places as Mississippi, but their attention was given primarily to the enduring violence, poverty, and brutality through which Black communities lived. These histories have come at the expense of telling other kinds of stories, ones, for example, that would describe how rural Black women established a way to empower themselves through their representations of self-defined cultural practices and artistic expressions.1 Studies analyzing how rural Black women created respect for themselves as well as