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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 35.3 | The History Cooperative
35.3  
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Autumn, 2004
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Book Review


The Making of "Mammy Pleasant": A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. By Lynn M. Hudson. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xi + 193 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)
      This newest biography of Mary Ellen ("Mammy") Pleasant provides an extensive literature review of the ways others characterized her. It offers sixty-five pages of endnotes addressing allegations that she was a voodoo queen, a madam, a mammy, and more. Hudson frequently reminds her readers that Mammy Pleasant "jealously guarded many details of her life as a means of controlling her representations" (p. 10). Readers learn little about Pleasant's entrepreneurial and legal activities in San Francisco since historical records about Pleasant are often obscured by rumor. In this book, Mammy Pleasant emerges as an invention of those around her rather than as an individual agent. . . .
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