Be Your Own Best Advocate

Be Your Own Best Advocate is part of my "Warrior Women" series. A warrior woman is out-spoken when something needs to be said. She uses her influence to better her community and lifts others up along the way.

As I keep working with the Warrior Women series my perception of what that means to me keeps expanding. Sometimes I have a lot of information about the woman, the place, or time in the image I have chosen. Sometimes I don’t. This woman just spoke to me very strongly through her image. She appeared regal, brave, and confident.

In my image search, I started to find a number of striking images of Black women taken in the Victorian times.  Unfortunately, they often didn’t come with any identifying information about the woman, details about the setting, or even the photographer.  That only made me more curious to know what the lives of these women were like.

The Victorian Era brought very proscribed expectations for women in the dominant white society, called the “the cult of true womanhood” which included traits such as domesticity, high moral standards, and impeccable presentation of self and home. In “Black Ideals of Womanhood in the late Victorian Era”, author Shirly Carlson writes about the important role of “Black Victorias” in their own communities. She studied Black communities in Illinois that were a mixture of those who were settled there and those who immigrated from the South and East during the post emancipation era. This was a microcosm of the changes in black communities across the country during the time period of 1890-1910, known as the late Victorian Era.

Black Victorias had a very important role in Black communities during a critical point in history.  They served as a model for women’s empowerment, leadership, and civic engagement. Although, we don’t know the names of the women in these photographs, they tell their story by radiating their confidence, beauty, and strength.  To learn more click on her image in the Warrior Women Gallery.