"These essays offer a wide-ranging intellectual history of the 'budding womanhood of the race.'"–The Village Voice"Though she celebrates the achievement of black women more than she protests the injustices against them, her book of essays is nontheless feminist in its viewpoint....Mossell consistently stresses race-consciousness as she promotes the cause of black women. Readers will appreciate her documentation of black intellectual and professional achievement and her black literary history (perhaps one of the first such attempts at a survey)..."–The Women's Review of Books"The Work of the Afro-American Woman recorded the black woman's moral, material, intellectual, and artistic progress within the dominant culture of Victorian America. It held exemplary models of black womanhood before the public view, argued for an end to caste and color discrimination, and challenged the so-called 'cult of true womanhood' with race-centered analysis. For the contemporary reader, The Work represents a historical connection with the black foremothers who defended their names and images and documented their literary and cultural traditions at the turn of the century. In this work lie the wellsprings of black feminist literary expression and the same impulses to document, to share, to inspire and instruct that inform the writings of today's black women."–Joanne Braxton, in her Introduction
