A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life by Eliza Potter

Dates & Times: 2:00pm - 3:00pm, Thursday, June 9, 2022Įvent URL will be sent via registration email. Registration is required and can be done online. Copies of the book may be found on the Reading Group shelves on the second floor of the library.įor the Thurs June 9 meeting, please read the excerpt from Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (p.248) the excerpt from Jacob Stroyer’s My Life in the South (p.336) and the excerpt from Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s Nat Turner’s Insurrection (p.34).įor the Thurs June 23 meeting please read the Lost Friends Advertisements from the Southwestern Christian Advocate (p.610) the excerpt from Congressman Richard Harvey Cain’s speech “All We Ask is Equal Laws, Equal Legislation, Equal Rights” (p.594) the Selections from the Anglo-African Magazine (p.161) and Henry McNeal Turner’s speech “I Claim the Rights of a Man” (p.584). The group will meet twice over Zoom to discuss different selections from the book in depth. Xiomara Santamarina provides an insightful introduction to this edition that includes newly discovered information about Potter, discusses the author's strong satirical voice and proud working-class status, and places the narrative in the context of nineteenth-century literature and history.In honor of Juneteenth, join us to read and discuss selections from Unsung: Unheralded Narratives of American Slavery & Abolition, a collection of narratives, writings, and poems written by enslaved and formerly enslaved Americans. Because her work offered insights into the private lives of elite white women, Potter carved out a literary space that featured a black working woman at the center, rather than at the margins, of the era's transformations in gender, race, and class structure. But more important is Potter's portrait of herself as a wage-earning woman, proud of her work, who earned high pay and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest beauticians at a time when most black women worked at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women-and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati's gossip columnists at the time. Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women - and she recorded. Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature-Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life. Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature - Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, 'A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life'.

A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life by Eliza Potter