  African American women were especially prominent in endeavoring to attend thoughtfully and pragmatically to the well-being of the race, but also in endeavoring to make good for Black women on the promises of Emancipation for social, political, and economic freedom. An exemplary figure in this regard is Anna Julia Cooper (1859?-1964), who graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and, at age sixty-five, completed a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 1788–1805 (Cooper 1925). A career educator before earning her doctorate, Cooper was a pioneering feminist who set out a provocative view of what she regarded as the superior capacity of women to lead the reformation of the human race in her book A Voice from South (1892). Poet, journalist, novelist, and essayist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911) weighed in with a forceful argument that the “spiritual aid” that women can provide is crucial for moral development and the social advancement of the human race (“Woman’s Political Future,” 1893). Memphis, Tennessee-born and Oberlin College-educated Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) lived a stellar life of articulate leadership in uplift and advocacy organizations devoted to the development and well-being of Colored women (Colored Women’s League, the National Association of Colored Women), commitments articulated in “The Progress of Colored Women” (1898, published 1904) and other writings. Fluent in several languages, Terrell forged relations with Negro and other women in several countries who worked for reforms on behalf of women.  And particular note must be taken of the audacious, pistol-totting Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), an investigative journalist and newspaperwoman who took it upon herself, as an anti-lynching crusader, to investigate cases of lynching across the country to document the facts of each case, which she published in 1895 as The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States with an introductory letter from Frederick Douglass, with whom she collaborated in many endeavors. During an especially violent and trying period, courageous, thoughtful, and articulate activist Black women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell, and others initiated what would become a long and varied tradition of feminist philosophizing and work by women of African descent devoted to the enhancing development of Negro persons, families, organizations, and communities.