Rachel Lumsden’s “Uplift, Gender, and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha” is an article that discusses the relationship between racial uplift and gender and how it is portrayed in the opera. In the beginning of the composition, Lumsden focuses on racial uplift and gender in the real world. Lumsden’s main theme was the eclipsing of black women’s contributions. During the highlight of the racial uplift period, black people, women and men, worked to improve the conditions of their race, by ways of “education, self-help, service, and the moral and material progress of African Americans”. Though both black men and women contributed to the upliftment of the black race, the contributions of black women were often overshadowed. Lumsden then highlights the many different black women that contributed to this movement and Anna Julia Cooper was one of them.