INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK IS about the work and family life of women whose foremothers were brought to this country in chains as enslaved laborers. The forces that shaped the institution of human bondage in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the states; whether black women toiled in a sweltering Virginia tobacco factory in the 1890s or in the kitchen of a Chicago white woman in the 1950s, they felt the oppressive force of racial and gender ideologies, ideas of social difference that until the mid-1960s carried the weight of law. Throughout American history, black women’s meager wages—and in the case of slavery, lack of any wages at all—stood in stark contrast to their strenuous labors in the workforce and at home. In their efforts to sustain family ties and preserve a vital group culture, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all groups, a purpose that did not abate with the passage of time. This study seeks to offer more than a chronicle of changes in patterns of black women’s labor as enslaved workers, wage earners, nurturers, and community activists from 1830 to the present; it is also a testament to the stubbornness of a mother’s love in opposition to the dehumanizing demands of the marketplace.

Black women’s work took place within three distinct spheres that were simultaneously mutually reinforcing and antagonistic. One workplace consisted of their own households, the locus of family feeling, and another consisted of their own communities, which remained largely segregated, in political if not spatial terms, from white people. The family obligations of wives and mothers also overlapped in the area of community welfare, as their desire to provide for their kin and neighbors expanded out of the private realm and into public activities that advanced the interests of black people as a group. In contrast to these kinds of work, which earned for black women the respect of their own people, participation in the paid labor force (or slave economy) reinforced their subordinate status as women and as blacks within American society. As defined by white men, “racial” and gender ideologies amounted to political strategies intended to keep white women and black people “in their place” by enforcing a social division of labor that relegated these groups to certain kinds of jobs. Because of their doubly disadvantaged status, black women were confined to two types of work that seemed ironically contradictory—the first was domestic and institutional service, vindictively termed women’s work; the other was manual labor so physically arduous it was usually considered men’s work. The vast majority of black female wage earners were barred from peacetime factory labor and from the traditional (white) female occupations of secretarial and sales work until well into the 1960s. Moreover, black married women have always worked in proportionately greater numbers than white wives; not until relatively recently did percentages of married workers begin to converge for women of the two groups. In fact, black women’s economic position relative to white women is analogous to women’s position relative to men, for black women have been limited to “black women’s work” that paid much less than that performed by white women.

Indeed, a focus on white women exclusively will miss the significance of slavery as a labor system that exploited black women, and will miss the fact that black wives entered the work force in greater numbers, only to face a fundamentally different kind of prejudice, compared to their white counterparts. Whether based on detailed case studies or general overviews, a grand narrative will reveal that women’s participation in the paid labor force has undergone tremendous changes over the last century and a half, but that an underlying current of continuity—in the form of inferior wages and jobs—has characterized women’s work throughout the period. When young women entered the first New England textile mills in the early nineteenth century, when the clerical and sales sectors began to draw large numbers of women into the workforce around 1900, both the national occupational structure and the institution of the family registered profound effects. Nevertheless, women remained segregated in female jobs, and their pay remained but a fraction of men’s. Although it is possible to generalize, noting that patterns of black women’s work also underwent transformations over the years and that these women also endured a persistent form of inequality, the history of white women yields only a narrow conception of the larger forces that affected black women’s work. The history of black working women does not constitute a subset of white women’s history; rather, the history of white women remains incomplete without a full understanding of the ways racial and gender ideologies shaped the lives of all women—and all men, for that matter.

Throughout American history, the black family has been the site of a struggle between black women and the whites who sought to profit from their labor, slaveowners and employers who saw black mothers’ family responsibilities as detrimental to their own financial interests. To these white people, the black family offered a steady and reliable source of new laborers; black women reproduced the supply of cheap labor at the same time they fed and nurtured their own kin groups. However, women’s attention to family duties represented a diversion of their time, energy, and physical resources that might otherwise have been expended in the workforce. Slaveholders callously disregarded black familial relationships in order to pursue their own profit-making; but even after emancipation, the more time a sharecropping mother spent with her children at home, the less cotton her family was bound to produce. The large-scale withdrawal of black females from the cotton fields immediately after the Civil War made white planters realize that the tight control they formerly enjoyed over their field hands was gone forever. To cite another example, in the late nineteenth century, southern domestics defied the wishes of white housewives and refused to “live in.” By returning home at night, black servants had an opportunity to see their own families for a brief time each day; in the process they deprived white women of a servant “on call” twenty-four hours a day. For these reasons, the welfare of the black family (as defined by its own members) could have explicitly negative implications for white landowners and housewives.

The political consequences of black women’s family duties became dramatically apparent when slave cooks stole food from the master’s kitchen to feed hungry runaways, and when grandmothers prepared feasts for civil rights workers in the South during the 1960s. A mother’s love could yield clearly political, and explosive, consequences; Mamie Bradley Till insisted that the corpse of her beaten and mutilated son Emmett, murdered by two Mississippi white men in 1955, be displayed in an open casket so “the whole world could see” what they had done to her child.¹ On an everyday level, the social context of a woman’s work determined the commitment and concern she brought to different tasks, and to the same task, like cooking, under different circumstances. Carried out in the home of a white family, preparing and serving meals signaled a servant’s position as a lowly, ill-paid employee. Yet a woman notorious for her carelessness on the job might enjoy the praise of family and neighbors for her culinary skills and generosity. In an interview with anthropologist James Langston Gwaltney, May Anna Madison recalled with delight the “day-off get-togethers” hosted by rotating families in her native Kentucky neighborhood—Thursdays when friends would celebrate their day off from service with good food and companionship: “That was hard work, but people didn’t mind because they wanted to do that and they were working for themselves. They were working with people they liked and at the end they made this grand meal. Now, they didn’t work any harder for the white woman. As a matter of fact, they didn’t work as hard for white people as they did for themselves. But when we worked for ourselves, everybody did what he could do best and nobody bothered you.”² While May Anna Madison and other domestics were often present (as workers) at social gatherings of whites, no white people were ever privy to these Thursday get-togethers, a fact that highlights the social tensions between black women’s divergent worlds of work.

A focus on black working women—not only what they did, but also what they desired for themselves and their children—reveals the intersection of African American, laboring-class, and female cultures, all of which tended toward a cooperative ethos: In the words of an Afro-American saying, “What goes around comes around.” Black people demonstrated a communal solidarity that grew out of their African heritage on the one hand and the ruthless exploitation of their labor by whites on the other. While crucial to a full understanding of the origins and effects of the “racial” caste system, this perspective offers few insights into the complexities of male-female relationships as they manifested themselves within African American households and communities. Too often historians have used the gender-neutral term blacks (or “slaves”) to mean men exclusively.³ Yet an exploration of the gendered division of labor within black communities and households suggests how black people’s attempts to structure their own social order were thwarted by oppression. Furthermore, historians of American women have outlined the dimensions of a female sensibility and a working-class ethos that contrasted with the individualism and self-seeking so lauded by middle-class white males. But if black women sought solace and support in the company of their sisters, if they took pride in a family well fed, a congregation led joyfully in song, or a child graduated from high school, they nonetheless maintained a group self-consciousness and loyalty to their kin (reinforced by white hostility) that precluded any putative bonds of womanhood with slave mistresses or white female employers. Moreover, the tendency of members of the white laboring classes to claim “racial” superiority over black people with whom they in some cases shared a lowly material condition suggests that an analysis based exclusively on class factors will not yield a full understanding of black women’s work.

Over the last three decades, the field of American women’s history has grown exponentially, with scholars exploring many different groups of women throughout the British American colonies and the United States, and many different aspects of their labor and family lives. Yet there remains a preoccupation with the roles of women in the development of industrial capitalism—as middle-class consumers, members of the industrial workforce, and socializers and caretakers of future laborers. This particular approach encompasses a wide range of white women, from factory workers to full-time homemakers and genteel reformers. Yet it overlooks female agricultural laborers throughout the nineteenth and halfway into the twentieth centuries, divorced as these women were from the mainstream of industrial development. This is not to suggest that black women remained outside the process of industrialization; to the contrary, their labor as cotton cultivators helped to produce the raw material that fueled the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution, in the antebellum period, and the emergence of transnational capitalism beginning in the postbellum period. Moreover, their wage work as domestic servants freed middle-class white women to enter the labor force themselves, shop for consumer goods, or devote their leisure time to social-welfare activities that ameliorated the worst ills of the economic system, but kept it intact.

In recent years, scholars of black women’s work have produced an impressive number and range of articles and monographs. It is no longer possible to suggest, as it was in 1985, that historians have neglected black women, or the theme of connections between work and family. At the same time, the insights emerging from this scholarship have had strikingly little impact on federal social policy. Indeed, it is a cruel irony that, over the generations, scholars and policymakers alike have taken the manifestations of black women’s oppression and twisted them into the argument that a powerful black matriarchy exists.⁴ The persistent belief that any woman who fulfills a traditional male role, either as breadwinner or household head, wields some sort of all-encompassing power over her spouse and children is belied by the experiences of black working women. These women lacked the control over their own productive energies and material resources that would have guaranteed them a meaningful form of social power. Perhaps they were “freed” or “liberated” from narrow gender-role conventions, but they remained tied to overwhelming wage-earning and child-rearing responsibilities. As spiritual counselors and as healers, black women did exert informal authority over persons of both sexes and all ages in their own communities. Yet when measured against traditional standards of power—defined in terms of wealth; personal autonomy; and control over workers, votes, or inheritances—black wives and mothers had little leverage with which to manipulate the behavior of their kinfolk.

Nevertheless, legislators and bureaucrats have failed to address black women’s need for jobs in any systematic way. In the early twenty-first century, it was clear that large-scale structural unemployment among black men had taken an enormous toll on the integrity of lower-income black husband-wife, parent-child relationships. In pockets of concentrated poverty, women lacked access to good jobs and to quality education and daycare for their children. Single mothers had few choices but to accept public assistance, limited by law to five years’ worth, or work for wages too low to support their families. Yet ideologues continued to condemn “lazy” mothers receiving welfare and at the same time urge middle-class white working wives to hearken back to hearth and home. Thus the persistent oppression of poor black women revealed all the prejudices and contradictions inherent in national welfare policy.

By this time, several striking developments had complicated the history of black working women—first, the emergence of a black upper-middle class and with it a cohort of well-educated, high-achieving professionals; second, processes of labor displacement that affected factory workers and middle-class secretaries, bank tellers, retail clerks, and telephone operators; and third, the proliferation of multicultural, impoverished populations located all over the country. The passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which dismantled the legal basis of American apartheid, benefited a segment of the black community and paved the way for the election of an African American, Barack Obama, as president in 2008. Obama’s wife, Michelle, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, faced none of the legal, and few of the structural, barriers to success that had plagued the black women who came before her. Yet juxtaposed against her impressive achievements were the limitations faced by increasing numbers of poor people, particularly African Americans, rural whites, and recent immigrants, who lacked the formal education that would enable them to get secure, well-paying jobs and to provide their children with the kind of first-rate public education available by and large only to families in well-to-do suburbs.

Although in the pages that follow the concepts of work and the family are defined in the broadest possible way, they nonetheless yield a selective account of African American history. Fully one-half of this study deals exclusively with enslaved and rural and working-class women in the South (from 1830 to 1915), both because the vast majority of blacks lived in that region during those years and because such a focus provides a much needed corrective to the northeastern-urban bias implicit in much historical scholarship. Nevertheless, a comprehensive study of black women would necessarily involve a detailed examination of the religious and educational institutions that, together with the family, served as the linchpins of black community life. Black middle-class women have worked for pay outside their homes to a much greater extent than their white counterparts, and, as social workers, school teachers, and church and club members, often perceived themselves as civil rights activists in a way that middle-class white female professionals and reformers did not. Black women’s community work had a subversive component, for it served to defy a white society that not only saw blacks as exploitable labor, but also withheld from them the benefits of public and private social-welfare programs. These women deserve fuller treatment than they receive here; they appear in this study primarily insofar as their labors benefited their less well-to-do sisters, and only insofar as they themselves benefited from the hard work and sacrifices of their own less well-to-do mothers.⁵

Though focused on black working women, this study illuminates larger historical forces shaping the labor of many other groups. Structural changes in the economy over the last century and a half have contributed to the marginalization of black and white rural and working-class people alike. The wives of white sharecroppers also bore many children and toiled in the fields, receiving little in the way of financial compensation and existing on the fringes of the developing consumer economy. Eastern European immigrant women worked in factories and at home for pitifully low wages and under the most degrading conditions. Mechanization and the decline of heavy industry in the 1970s and 1980s adversely affected blue-collar workers regardless of skin color or ethnic background, many of whom found it difficult to reintegrate themselves into the white-collar and high-technology sectors. Early twenty-first century undocumented immigrants, deprived of the protections afforded U.S. citizens, remained susceptible to workplace exploitation in ways that echoed the history of African Americans. Thus the forces that conspired to keep black women and men in their inferior place also helped to undermine the economic security of other non-elites as well. Nevertheless, the basic premise of this work remains a compelling one: In their poverty and vulnerability, black people experienced these historical economic transformations in fundamentally different ways compared with other groups regardless of class, and black women, while not removed from the larger history of the American working class, shouldered unique burdens at home and endured unique forms of discrimination in the workplace. This theme holds true up to the present time, despite some observers’ claims that the United States has achieved “colorblind” and “post-racial” workplaces.

Any examination of the mechanics of prejudice risks reducing its human subjects to victims, helpless before a many-tentacled monster that invades every part of their body and soul. The cultural distinctiveness of black community life, and attempts by black working women to subordinate the demands of their employers to the needs of their own families, reveal the inherent weakness of the “victimization” perspective. Clearly, black people could live their lives apart from prejudice without being oblivious to or untouched by it. In her introduction to the richly textured and evocative memoir Lemon Swamp and Other Places, Karen Fields notes that while segregation and disfranchisement played “like a background Muzak unlistened to,” her grandparents “went purposefully in and out the front door of their life.”⁶ By virtue of their education and relatively comfortable material circumstances, Mamie and Robert Fields were able to maintain an emotional detachment from the meanspiritedness of white neighbors and public officials. Though exceptional in terms of their class status, they reveal how all black women and men struggled, with varying degrees of success, to define their lives according to their own terms.

The history of black working women is too often and too easily reduced to the images of the long-suffering mother—in the words of the poet Langston Hughes, “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair,”⁷ on the one hand—and the indomitable grandmother—pillar of strength and wisdom to all who know her—on the other. Literary critic Mary Helen Washington has observed that “there still remains something of a sacred-cow attitude in regard to black women that prevents exploration of many aspects of their lives.” She adds that “adopting the attitude of reverence means that we must settle for some idealized nonsense about black women and remain deprived of real characters from whom we could learn more about ourselves.”⁸ In some ways, this book is a nonfictional response to Mary Helen Washington’s challenge. In other ways, however, it falls short of her incisive critique of what other writers have called the “myth of the black ‘superwoman.’”⁹ While the historical data quite clearly reveal the broad range of black women’s individual and collective responses to their various workplaces, it has been difficult not to focus on those wives and mothers who, enduring great hardship, put their “sassiness” to good use in defense of their families, or found the wherewithal to help a neighbor whose plight was even more desperate than their own. In this account of black working women, evidence of their bitterness and sorrow abounds; still, the stories of those who survived with faith and courage reveal certain truths about the human spirit—truths that remind us, blacks and whites, women and men, of what poet Audre Lorde has called “the lessons of the black mothers in each of us.”¹⁰