| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 274 words from this article are provided below; about 585 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Xiomara Santamarina. Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 222. Cloth $45.00, paper $18.95.
Xiomara Santamarina argues that nineteenth-century black women spoke through their work, and the stories they told are filled with contests, compromise, and cultural surprise. Santamarina analyzes four texts of black "working womanhood" and examines the overlapping discourses of class, citizenship, race, and femininity. The stories illustrate how black working women sought independence through narratives about wage labor by shaping rhetorics for labor, race, and femininity. The women's texts create complex black feminist identities that range from a Sojourner Truth, who sought to revise a free-labor abolitionist argument, to Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln's dress-maker, who tried to parlay her patron's celebrity into her own cultural power. Each author examined wrote about her labor to expand her role and challenge the social order.	1
Santamarina recovers labor as an important explanatory factor and embeds it in a complex cultural analysis. Scholars lately worry that their analyses could fall into a dated Marxist chasm that uses labor to link economy and society. Not so Santamarina. She refuses to rely on one factor alone to define identity and strives for more complicated explanations of racial formation, gender relations, and, of course, class. When antebellum black women wrote about work, for instance, they gained power as the owners of their own labor, but they ran the risk of creating a text that illustrated how they failed to conform to middle-class models of femininity. Their narratives had to fill in the ideological gaps.	. . .

There are about 585 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.