Published in 1981
556 pages
Dorothy Sterling was an American writer and historian who published more than 35 books for children and adults. Her books pioneered culturally diverse subjects for children’s nonfiction including some of the first nonfiction works about black history, notably Freedom Train, about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad.
What is this book about?
We Are Your Sisters, a collection of letters, oral histories, and excerpts from diaries and autobiographies, is “a documentary portrayal of black women who lived between 1800 and the 1880s.” As such, We Are Your Sisters provides a panoramic portrait of black women’s lives, presenting the words of laundresses and maids, of writers and teachers. You’ll find the testimonies of slave women, as collected in the 1920s and ’30s by the Federal Writers Project, on such matters as work, courtship, and family life; letters from slave women that include moving appeals for husbands to save them from slave traders; and first-person accounts of women’s resistance to slavery. There are also letters from women such as Rosetta Douglass Sprague, the daughter of Frederick Douglass; accounts of the doings of upper-class blacks in the years following the Civil War; and excerpts from the diary of Frances Rollin, author of a biography of black activist and Civil War soldier Martin Delany.
Documents the trials and joys of nineteenth-century Black women and suggests new ways of perceiving Black women, their relations with others, and their attitudes toward family, work, and feminism.
“A remarkable documentary and the first in-depth record of many black women, slave and free.”–Dorothy B. Porter, curator emeritus, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University
