Part intellectual history, part advice book, and part polemic, this collection of original essays and poetry is a defence and celebration of the achievements - moral, material, intellectual, and artistic - of black women in Victorian America. Writing as a Christian, a mother, and a wife, Mrs Mosell held exemplary models of black womanhood before the public eye. A source of instruction and inspiration in its own time, it remains today a valuable document of black American cultural and intellectual history.