cultivate a sense of educational rigor in African American female intellectuals and the black community in the US would benefit from as a whole. This is to counter the overly aggressive and male-dominated academic writings in higher education and balance them with more female voices, hence Cooper is widely recognized as the "mother of Black feminism". Furthermore, Cooper did not just see higher education as a way to improve the socioeconomic situation of African American communities, but also as a foundation for the continuous learning and a community based approach to upliftment that would cause the "universal betterment" of people and humanity as a whole. Cooper advocated for the democratization of both public and private higher education which has been seen as "bastions of white, male elitism" and a "focus on reproducing English culture and cementing Christian doctrine", as the changing nature of American culture that now grapples with centuries of relegating women and racial minorities to the lowest rungs of society. Ann Folwell Stanford In the article "Mechanisms of Disease: African-American Women Writers, Social Pathologies, and the Limits of Medicine" (1994), Ann Folwell Stanford argues that novels by African-American women writers Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, and Gloria Naylor offer a feminist critique of the biomedical model of health that reveals the important role of the social (racist, classist, sexist) contexts in which bodies function. Barbara Christian In 1988, Barbara Christian discusses the issue of "minority disclosure". See also African American Review Black sermonic tradition AALBC.com African American African-American history Africanfuturism Afrofuturism American literature Baltimore Afro-American Callaloo (journal) Chicano literature Daughters of Africa Ebony Jet List of African-American writers List of Black New York Times Best Selling Authors Mythology of Benjamin Banneker Negro Digest The Journal of African American History Southern Gothic Timeline of African-American children's literature Urban fiction Notes References Andrews, W., F. Foster and T. Harris (eds).The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Oxford, 1997. Brodhead, R. "An Anatomy of Multiculturalism". Yale Alumni Magazine, April 1994. Excerpted here. Cashmore, E. "Review of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature" New Statesman, April 25, 1997. Dalrymple, T. "An Imaginary 'Scandal'", The New Criterion, May 2005. Davis, M., M. Graham, and S. Pineault-Burke (eds). Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice. Routledge, 1998. Gates, H. The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters With the Founding Fathers, Basic Civitas Books, 2003 Gilyard, K., and A.