Feminist ethics, the project of living with gender in all its varieties while also seeking to undo gender-related limitations, seems simultaneously retrograde, repetitive, and utterly necessary. This chapter seeks to make connections among several major feminist philosophers and transgender theorists, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, whose work unfolds these interconnections and differences in ways that also work through the contradictions of wanting to recognize how diverse women are but also not wanting to remain within the complex and constitutive but insufficient cultural definitions of gender.

This chapter examines the transitions in Black intellectual thought at the turn of the century. It charts the shifts in W. E. B. Du Bois’s thinking, not in isolation, but as a member of a Black intellectual elite who were grappling with the same questions and challenges regarding the role of the Black intellectual. The chapter shows that Du Bois, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, and others saw their academic training as intimately connected with efforts to advance racial understanding and challenge the ideological bases of white supremacy. Rereading Du Bois’s pre-1900 work and the transition in his thinking that Du Bois himself attributed to the horrific lynching of Sam Hose in 1899, the chapter reveals how Du Bois’s thinking shifted over the course of the decade from a commitment to historical method and fact-finding to a more activist and militant approach that would take roots through his work on his John Brown biography, published in 1909, and eventually finding expression in the founding of the NAACP that same year.

This chapter looks closely at 1906, an exceptional year in which the first half celebrated the achievements and progress in educational matters and race relations, while the second half was dominated by an increasing wave of racial discrimination, injustice, and unrest. In many ways 1906 can be seen as a pivotal year in the decade 1900–10, with the first half of it marked by African American achievements in literary production and expanded educational opportunities, while the second part saw the dramatic reentrenchment of racial antagonisms – as displayed in the Atlanta race riots and critical challenges within the ranks of Black leadership. Examining the Colored American Magazine, a New York–based Black monthly controlled, in 1906, by Booker T. Washington, and the Voice of the Negro, the more radical, Atlanta-based Black paper, as well as other Black newspapers and magazines, this chapter explores how a framework of blessings and disasters sheds light on turn-of-the-century developments in three critical, interrelated areas: literary production, education and school policy, and racial unrest.

This essay discusses Anna Julia Cooper’s analysis of slavery, imperialism, and the Age of Revolution: it also raises questions about the politics and practices of recovery. Cooper’s writings offer a rich resource for countering the erasure of Black women’s contributions to international thought: readers are invited to theorize alongside Cooper's anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-imperialist work as a scholar-educator. Navigating several absences, she encountered when working in French colonial archives in the 1920s, Cooper unpacked dominant frameworks, exposed gaps, and pivoted attention to the histories, ideas, and actions of people of color. Cooper’s identity, as a Black American woman in interwar France, a former slave who argued with white supremacist exponents of the ‘Nordic vogue,’ was central to her writing. While structurally marginalized by gender, race, class, age and nationality, Cooper refused to be silenced and dared to criticize the greats of French sociology while completing her doctoral work in Paris.