Elise Johnson McDougald

Life & Legacy

Elise Johnson McDougald (October 13, 1885 – June 10, 1971), a.k.a. Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, was an American educator, writer, activist and first African-American woman principal in New York City public schools following the consolidation of the city in 1898. She was preceded by Sarah J. Garnet, an early African American woman principal from Brooklyn, New York, while it was still considered a separate city, who in 1863 began a 37-year-long career as principal in Manhattan's racial caste "colored" public schools. McDougald's essay "The Double Task: The Struggle for Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation" was published in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine, Harlem: The Mecca of the New Negro. This particular issue, edited by Alain Locke, helped usher in and define the Harlem Renaissance. McDougald's contribution to this magazine, which Locke adapted for inclusion as "The Task of Negro Womanhood" in his 1925 anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation, is an early example of African-American feminist writing.