| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mary McLeod Bethune & Black Women's Political Activism. By Joyce A. Hanson. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. xiv, 248 pp. $32.50, ISBN 0-8262-1451-7.)

The Making of "Mammy Pleasant": A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. By Lynn M. Hudson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xiv, 193 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-252-02771-X.)

At first glance, there could hardly be a more unlikely pairing than that of the somewhat nefarious Mary Ellen Pleasant, the nineteenth-century activist and entrepreneur whose challenge-the-rules activities ranged from freeing slaves to vice, and the well-coiffed, work-within-the-system Mary McLeod Bethune, power broker on the federal level and woman of high repute. But Pleasant and Bethune shared many essential qualities, not the least of which was gumption. In these separate studies by Lynn M. Hudson and Joyce A. Hanson, convincing arguments are made about how these two pathbreakers from different eras, each in her own manner, offer us lessons about black women's means of wielding public power.

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