Leadership of Recognized Character

This chapter theorizes public comportment as a political strategy during the early years of the republic. It shows how elite African descendants negotiated gendered understandings of racial citizenship through their public behaviors. As elite Black civic activists navigated electoral politics, they promoted gendered forms of bodily comportment in all realms of elite social life. Elite Black women enacted bourgeois femininity through their attire and civic clubs. They circulated photograph portraits of accomplished subjects to convey the respectability of women who gave lectures, became educated professionals, and occasionally formed civic organizations. Elite and upwardly-mobile women of African descent negotiated the terms of patriarchy through their public roles, which reflected modernizing expectations of feminine behavior. Public comportment, in this sense, became a way for Cuban women of African descent to forge a modern image that contradicted negative racial stereotypes.