  In addition to these better-known major scholarly writings, Cooper went on to write and publish other essays and critical commentaries over several decades—including a memoir about earning her doctorate from the Sorbonne titled The Third Step and a memoir about the Grimké family titled The Early Years in Washington: Reminiscences of Life with the Grimkés (both memoirs published about the middle of the twentieth century).  Intentionally placing Cooper’s scholarship and activism front and center in recognizing her philosophical import goes against commentaries that cast aside Cooper’s theoretical contributions to focus almost exclusively on her biography and personal life.  As Lewis Gordon has noted in Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought (2000), too often we find a close examination of the ideas and theories of Black intellectuals absent because interpretations of their biographies and experiences have been preferred focal points. Vivian M. May takes this a step further in Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction (2007) where she notes a disturbing tendency among many writers to focus on Black women intellectuals’ lives rather than their theories. Consequently, Black women’s arguments and theoretical contributions have frequently been under-engaged or even dismissed altogether because so much attention is concentrated on their life stories. Indeed, the bulk of this encyclopedia entry focuses on Cooper’s scholarship, activism, and philosophical contributions in order to resist this troubling trend. A brief biographical and historical background is available at the end of this entry to locate Cooper’s theoretical work within a larger socio-historical and biographical context.