Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women

Focusing on the scholarly literature of fact rather than on fictional or popular portrayals, Disfigured Images explores the telling - and frequent mis-telling - of the story of black women during a century of American historiography beginning in the late 19th century and extending to the present. Morton argues that during this period, a large body of scholarly literature was generated that presented little fact and much fiction about black women’s history. The book’s ten chapters take a look at the black woman’s prefabricated past. Contemporary revisionist studies with their goals of discovering and articulating the real nature of the slave woman’s experience and role are thoroughly examined in the conclusion. Disfigured Images complements current work by recognizing in its findings a long-needed refutation of a caricatured, mythical version of black women’s history. Morton’s introduction presents an overview of her subject emphasizing the mythical, ingrained nature of the black woman’s image in historiography as a natural and permanent slave . The succeeding chapters use historical and social science works as primary sources to explore such issues as the foundations of sexism-racism, the writing of W.E.B. DuBois, 20th century notions of black women, current black and women’s studies, new and old images of motherhood, and more. The conclusion investigates how and why recent American historiographical scholarship has banished to old myths by presenting a more accurate history of black women.