The ideal Black woman of the Victorian era was expected to be committed to the domestic sphere as a wife and mother, acting as a dutiful companion to her husband while maintaining and managing an attractive home. Yet as many scholars have argued, the ideal of the postbellum Black woman was different from what was demanded of “true womanhood” by white society: the Black woman was expected to participate fully in both the private and public spheres. By the late nineteenth century, while Black men were active and empowering themselves in public debate, African American women were involved in the founding and building of institutions for the race. But few scholars have recognized the inherent distinctions between the efforts of working-class women who struggled against the simultaneous categories of race, class, and gender within the Black community, and those elite women who were afforded social privilege. Elite Black women were expected to participate within the acceptable boundaries of the “cult of true womanhood,” which espoused “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity.” Women were only expected to participate in public affairs through their local churches. Unlike elite white women, who began to blur the distinctions between private and public only during the Progressive era, African American working-class women reformers had long been engaged in community affairs, working across the categories of race, class, and gender. The distinctions between public and private spheres, or the dichotomy between domestic and public, particularly among African American women, is unique. Black women found ways to challenge the traditional paradigms of patriarchy and hierarchy, which relegated women to separate spheres, through their efforts in race uplift. Black women reformers, because of their acknowledged duties as the mothers and wives of the race, assumed the primary responsibility for communal self-improvement, challenging the politics and power of separate spheres as the tools of male oppression. African American women who broke with these gendered notions of propriety were, however, prepared to meet the challenges of their roles as bearers of culture and as agents for historical recovery, regardless of their treatment by Black male reformers.