  These and other thoughtful, articulate, and engaged Black women did not allow themselves to be limited to subordinate roles of influence on male leaders. Rather, as was true for many of their foresisters, they had important matters of concern about which they thought seriously, discussed in their women’s clubs and other organizations, wrote and spoke, and worked with determination to effect progressive transformations in the lives of women and their families as well as for the racial group and the society as a whole. From the especially violent and trying decades of Reconstruction on into the early decades of the twentieth century, women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell, and others contributed substantially to what has become a long and varied tradition of woman-focused philosophizing and artistic expression by women of African descent in the United States.