  In “Womanhood: A Vital Element in the Regeneration and Progress of a Race” (1886) Cooper astutely addresses intersecting issues of race, gender, and society—including intra-group racial politics, intra-group gender politics, and the professed ideals of American society. Her observations speak directly to debates in early African American philosophy and political thought around leadership, representation, and competing philosophies of race (for example between Frederick Douglass’s assimilationism and Martin Delany’s separatism). Concerning intra-group racial politics, Cooper asserts: “The Late Martin Delany, who was an unadulterated black man, used to say when honors fell upon him, that when he entered the council of kings the black race entered with him; meaning, I suppose, that there was no discounting his race identity and attributing his achievements to some admixture of Saxon blood” (VAJC 63). As a Black woman whose father is thought to have been her mother’s white master, Cooper pushes back on two fronts.  Not only can Delany not represent the whole simply by virtue of his “pure” Black blood (unmixed with Saxon blood), but also because “no man can represent the race” (VAJC 63). It is in this context that Cooper made the now famous declaration that “Only the BLACK WOMAN can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me” (VAJC, 63). Here she problematizes intra-group race and gender politics (specifically Black male patriarchy) by insisting on the significance of the BLACK WOMAN in general and laying claim to her particular significance as a Black woman to the progress of the race—this despite the admixture of Saxon blood, which in her case had been violently imposed by the legacy of slavery and the systematic sexual exploitation of Black women.