An Efficient Womanhood

360 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 31 halftones, notes, bibl., index, selected bibliography

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8328-7
Published: January 2025
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8327-0
Published: January 2025

Paperback Available January 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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From its Kingston, Jamaica, inception in 1914, women helped define and shape the Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist aims of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Their efforts, made possible in part by UNIA cofounder Amy Ashwood Garvey, helped sustain the largest social justice organization of the twentieth century. In this deeply researched collective biography, Natanya Duncan documents the complexities of UNIA women as active participants in Black nation-building. Women from both sides of the Atlantic joined the UNIA in pursuit of gender and racial equality, developing a three-tiered activist strategy that Duncan calls “efficient womanhood”: seek equitable partnerships with like-minded persons and organizations, work as peer and intergenerational mentors, and serve as bridge builders between the organization and resources and people in service to their immediate communities and the race at large.

Through an impressive and original archive of their self-determination, Duncan presents the stories of Henrietta Vinton Davis, Maymie de Mena, and Laura Kofey, as well as groups of UNIA women like the Black Cross Nurses, the Universal African Motor Corp, and the Lucy 9 Club, who circumvented the ideals of their era and created a brand of independent female leadership. The book demonstrates how UNIA women orchestrated and activated the organization from the bottom up while influencing and informing men and each other. By focusing on how women of the UNIA created an activist framework, Duncan reveals a model of organizing that has endured into the present day.

About the Author

Natanya Duncan is associate professor of history and director of Africana studies at Queens College CUNY.
For more information about Natanya Duncan, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"A bold intervention in the library of works on Garveyite women, this significant collective biography adds a wealth of new information to our knowledge of how women attained, created, and exercised leadership in the world's largest Pan-African movement. It challenges the idea that these movements were always and forever male-run and male-dominated."—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Black Women's Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power

"Natanya Duncan's seminal work fills a major void in the UNIA's history, bringing to the fore a new set of women who have fallen through the archival cracks and shifting the history of the movement beyond Garvey himself."—Ula Y. Taylor, author of The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey

"With this compelling collective biography of Garveyite women in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, Natanya Duncan deepens and expands our understanding of Black nationalism and the global dimensions of Garveyism and the UNIA, the largest black-led political organization in world history."—Robert Trent Vinson, author of The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa

"Print culture, and the The Negro World in particular, made the Universal Negro Improvement Association truly universal. Rarely has the newspaper been so edifyingly mined, demonstrating women’s preponderance in Garveyism. This is a veritable manual for how to organize, a testament to [Duncan’s] thorough research and sheer scholarly grit."—Michael West, coeditor of From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution