African American Women's Sexuality

Abstract

I would like to thank Joanne Meyerowitz for organizing and inviting me to participate in this roundtable and for giving me the opportunity to refl ect briefl y on the importance of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal work, Intimate Matters. Few works have infl uenced the development of a fi eld both in laying the groundwork for future scholarship and in shaping pedagogical practice as powerfully as Intimate Matters has done in the fi eld of the history of sexuality in the United States. It is hard to believe it has been twentyfi ve years since its initial publication— like many others I continue to use it in my history of sexuality courses and to turn to it as a touchstone in my ongoing eff orts to grapple with the sweep of America’s sexual past and present and the place of black sexuality and, in particular, the sexual lives of African American women within that history. I reached for this book early and oft en in my own work on black women’s sex work in turnofthecentury Chicago. Th e interpretive framework John and Estelle off er in Intimate Matters provided a backdrop against which the crucial role of black women’s sexual labor and the interracial and intraracial politics surrounding it became visible for me. It helped me to understand the central connection between black migration and sexual modernization in the early twentieth century. And it provided a lens through which to see and further probe the historical criminalization of black sexuality and the role that the regulation of black bodies played in defi ning citizenship in earlytwentiethcentury cities. Th e analytical frameworks that John and Estelle developed in Intimate Matters— the mapping of the transformation in the meaning of sexuality from its primary association with reproduction and the family to an association with individual sexual pleasure, the development of the concepts of civilized morality and sexual liberalism, and their steady focus on the ways that sexuality has simultaneously refl ected and served to maintain systems of class, gender, and racial oppressions within the United States— have provided the scaf-