The lyrical and political power of nineteenth-century women reformers' life writing

Paper Heroines studies the ways women represented their own and one another's lives in their personal diaries and their biographies of their contemporaries. Author Mollie Barnes urges us to read the life writing that emerged from among the relief-work networks of the South Carolina Lowcountry as deeply interconnected. By reading these women writers—Black and white, obscure and well-known—in conversation, Barnes presents entirely new portraits of these nineteenth-century freedom fighters. Like feminist and anti-racist leaders in our own moment, the women in Paper Heroines were often flawed. White women reformers sometimes created tensions, silences, revisions, and erasures within their print-culture networks, obscuring the lives and contributions of Black women. Black women developed counternarratives and counternetworks as they sought to reclaim their own life histories. What emerges from Barnes's exploration of these textual conversations is a story of complicated relationships that reveal the dynamism of women's lives in a place and time that was equally tumultuous and consequential.