Who was responsible?

About this book

In her novel Who Was Responsible? (1919), Maggie Shaw Fullilove links temperance activism to a strong feminist vision. Like Frances Harper's recently rediscovered novel Sowing and Reaping: A Temperance Tale, this work has as its central themes women's security within marriage and their rights as moral and political reformists. Both Harper and Shaw Fullilove also use racially indeterminate characters. This strategy shields black men from charges of inherited tendencies toward dissipation and barbarism in an era when theories of degeneration were used to justify lynchings and systematic disenfranchisement. The four stories contained in the present volume, originally published from 1917 to 1918 in the African-American journal the Half Century, examine the connections and tensions among the issues of temperance, economic development, women's rights, and domesticity. . Mary Etta Spencer's novel The Resentment (1921) is a racial rags to riches tale that supports Booker T. Washington's urging of black Southerners to "cast down your buckets where you are." Its hero is an African-American Horatio Alger, who, despite adversity, succeeds as a Southern farmer and garners the support of his white and black neighbors.