Hallie Q. Brown and twenty-eight contributors recreate the lives of sixty remarkable Afro-American women, all born in the United States or Canada between the 1740s and the end of the nineteenth century. Slaves and social workers, artists and activists, cake makers and home makers, their stories offer unusual insight into female networks, patterns of voluntary association, work, religion, family life, and black women's culture.

Church, school, and club constitute the triumvirate of associations central to the lives of the women chronicled in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, compiled and edited by Hallie Quinn Brown.

Church, school, and club constitute the triumvirate of associations central to the lives of the 60 Afro-American women born in the United States or Canada between the mid-1740s and the end of the nineteenth century and chronicled in Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction....It is distinguished as a collaborative effort by a group of self-confident and historically self-conscious black women who were determined to preserve the stories of sacrifice and struggle their forebears had endured.