  There is not yet a book length analysis written by a philosopher that focuses on Cooper’s philosophical import and contributions, however; one could certainly argue that Vivian M. May’s Anna Julia Cooper, Visionary Black Feminist: A Critical Introduction (2007) offers the most comprehensive analysis of Cooper’s writings to date. Going against critical readings and (mis)interpretations of Cooper as an elitist who subscribed to Western ethnocentrism and Victorian constructions of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” May challenges Cooper’s readers and critics to engage in a more nuanced analysis of her writings and activism. For example, May emphasizes Cooper’s activism (which is often marginalized and/or erased altogether in the secondary literature) in a way that demonstrates how Cooper’s lived experience and scholarship were quite anti-elitist. According to May, “Perhaps, then, the challenge lies in developing flexible interpretative strategies able to attend to Cooper’s different vocal registers or resonances without silencing them, and more expansive notions of political action or of counter-publics able to recognize a broader range of activities as, in fact, activist” (50). Additionally, in response to Stephanie Athey’s framing of Cooper as problematically relying on eugenic language and ideology, May presents a counter-argument reading Cooper as contributing to an early materialist Black feminist analysis of Black women’s oppression (55). Contra claims that Cooper sought to imitate whiteness or Western ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism, May underscores Cooper’s contention that “imitation is the worst of suicide” and adds, “Cooper argued that what African Americans needed most was ‘deliverance’ from normative whiteness” (61). May also emphatically rejects dismissals of Cooper as a woman invested in the oppressive habitus of “True Womanhood,” offering an alternate reading of Cooper as one who manipulates and strategically redeploys, rather than fully accepts or embraces, the tenets of True Womanhood.