Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme where we randomly select a book from our Goodreads To Be Read list and share it with the world. It’s hosted by Lauren’s Page Turners, so be sure to link back to her site so that we can all see what everyone plans to read!

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women
by Brittney Cooper
208 pages
Nonfiction/Feminism/Race
Published May 2017, by University of Illinois Press

From Goodreads: Beyond Respectability charts the development of African American women as public intellectuals and the evolution of their thought from the end of the 1800s through the Black Power era of the 1970s. Eschewing the Great Race Man paradigm so prominent in contemporary discourse, Brittney C. Cooper looks at the far-reaching intellectual achievements of female thinkers and activists like Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Fannie Barrier Williams, Pauli Murray, and Toni Cade Bambara. Cooper delves into the processes that transformed these women and others into racial leadership figures, including long-overdue discussions of their theoretical output and personal experiences. As Cooper shows, their body of work critically reshaped our understandings of race and gender discourse. It also confronted entrenched ideas of how–and who–produced racial knowledge.

My sister marked this as ‘To Read’ over the weekend, and I did too, as it looks like a fascinating look at Black women’s voices regarding gender and race. It may be difficult to find a copy, but I’m sure I can track one down somewhere.