An Examination of African American Women's Lives in Postwar Philadelphia

"StrangeLove": Searchingfor Sexual Subjectivities in Black PrintPopular Cultureduringthe 1950s Leisa D. Meyer Myrtle Hartgrove, Atlanta, GA—Dear Editor: I just finished glanc ing through your first issue of Tan Confessions, and frankly I feel that you've gone to a lot of trouble to waste a lot of valuable paper. What is the point behind the whole thing? Those stories that you call "true to life," are simply impossible. No self-respecting woman with an ounce of decency would allow any of those things to happen to her that you have published as "the truth." You should be ashamed to advertise such trash on the same page with such honorable publi cations as Ebony and Negro Digest. Jane White, Los Angeles, CA—Dear Editor: Thanks a lot for coming out with your new magazine, Tan Confessions. I am a long time buyer of romantic magazines and while I know that they are trash I would much rather spend my money for "colored trash" than "white trash."1 The disparate reactions of myrtle hartgrove and jane white to the firstissue of Tan Confessions indicate that the sexuality rendered in this monthly publication's intimate stories was deeply contested ter rain for African American readers. I seek in this essay to analyze more broadly such contestations, drawing on a range of articles, letters, and responses in black popular culture magazines in the period immedi ately following World War II. Through an interrogation of the negoti ations among individuals and within groups, we can see the complex and diverse sexual subjectivities (or potential subjectivities) of African American women as they are articulated, debated, weighed, explored, FeministStudies38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). © 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 625 626 Leisa D. Meyer reconfigured, and at times, rejected. What becomes clear through this material is that while there was an explicit and often direct engage ment with white normative cultural presumptions concerning Afri can American sexuality, there were also alternative racialized sexual subjectivities that were explicitly proposed, discussed, and debated within these pages. Myrtle Hartgrove's comments hold up the "decent" and "self respecting" woman as a bulwark against the "trash"—stories of black women's romantic and sexual encounters — offered in the pages of Tan Confessions. Hartgrove's invocation of respectability guards against the longstanding racist trope of hypersexuality and its concomitant insinuation that African American women are not "respectable."2 Many African American women refuted the racist hypersexual image in order to protect themselves and their daughters from its conse quences and also to assert desire and claim their sexuality and sexual subjectivity. Hartgrove here engages in a "politics of respectability"— historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's oft-cited phrase describing African American women's promotion of restrained behavior, espe cially restrained sexual behavior, as a "strategy of reform" during the early twentieth century. For Higginbotham, this strategy enabled African American women to "define themselves outside the param eters of prevailing racist discourses."3 Historian Paisley Harris on the other hand has critiqued this strategy and its consequences, charac terizing the politics of respectability as having a "gatekeeping func tion" that established a "behavioral entrance fee" for membership in African American communities. While this "entrance fee" offered some challenge to hegemonic cultural views of African Americans, it also constructed and maintained status distinctions within African American communities.4 Subsequent studies of African American women's lives and sex ualities have expanded this understanding of the "gatekeeping func tion" of respectability beyond the particular historical moment that Higginbotham explores. As Michele Mitchell suggests in her essay on African American women's history, it is "important to ponder whether African Americanists who theorize gender and sexuality have fomented new silences." She goes on to note her "lurking suspicions" that "certain subjects are avoided because they have been deemed Leisa D. Meyer 627 either dangerous or damaging" and voices her "uneasfe] about the costs attached to this particular quiet."5 Literary scholar Matt Richardson also speaks to the problems of these silences in African American history: The tradition of representing Black people as decent and moral his torical agents has meant the erasure of the broad array of Black sex uality and gendered being in favor of a...

This essay examines the Iowa Federation of Colored Women's Clubs (IFCWC) campaign to operate a house for African American women at the University of Iowa from 1919 to 1950. (1) It seeks to add to a growing body of literature which focuses on African American philanthropy and collective black economic enterprises. An examination of the experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa and the IFCWC Home campaign offers an interesting case study that builds on recent research work on African American Women's philanthropy. (2) The IFCWC's economic enterprise developed because between 1913 and 1946, the University of Iowa barred African American students from campus and some student activities. The experiences of African American women at the University of Iowa are unique for two reasons: 1) the house they occupied was one of a few dormitories in the nation owned and operated by a formally organized group of African American women; and 2) the campaign to maintain the IFCWC Hom e provided mostly middle-class African American women students with the organizational, intellectual, and leadership skills necessary to become the next generation of black women activists. In general, the experiences of African American college women at predominantly white coeducational institutions in the early twentieth century are unique because white women often had the guidance and support of white women administrators and/or faculty. (3) African American women, on the other hand, had to look outside the university for such mentors and role models. The question remains then, how did the alliance with the IFCWC help to keep students connected to the African American community; and how did the community respond? How did limited employment prospects that resulted from race and gender prejudice help to bring about a sharply focused movement to make a college education available to a number of Iowa's young African American women? I contend that the IFCWC prepared African American women at the University of I owa to assume positions of leadership in organizations such as the IFCWC, National Association of Colored Women (NACW), the Order of the Eastern Star (OES), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a host of other local and regional civil rights organizations. (4) Upon graduation, these women also assumed responsibilities in their local communities in their effort to the race. This work places African American women's lives at the center of inquiry in a preexisting historiographical paradigm which often excludes them through a preoccupation with African American men and white women. A few scholars, such as Linda Perkins, Elizabeth Ihle, Jeanne Noble, and Ellen Lawson, have completed various studies on African American women's higher education. Other scholars, such as Amy Thompson McCandless, offer thorough and insightful comparisons of the southern white and southern black women's education in the twentieth century. Outside the works by this small group of historians, the experiences of college educated African American women have been marginal. Particularly missing from current studies is any examination of African American women in the midwest. (5) Although African American women's historiography has recently focused on Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, these works avoid any elaborate discussions of African American women's history in midwestern states west of the Mississippi River su ch as Minnesota, Nebraska, and Iowa. (6) To be sure, this study is not only specific to Iowa, but to African American women who attended the University of Iowa. I contend that racism did not paralyze these women's struggle for equality. They transformed their experiences with racism into a call for social activism, racial uplift, and service to their communities. (7) As Kevin Gaines, Stephanie Shaw and other scholars point out, although African Americans agreed on the ideal of uplift they did not always agree on what types of behavior were appropriate. …

A Movement without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia

Approximately 25%-50% of women with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including AIDS, are involved in abusive relationships. Numerous characteristics associated with a past history of abuse are also risk factors for STD infection, including multiple partner relationships, substance abuse, early age at first coitus, and partner control of the relationship. Research has identified psychological effects of previous abuse, including depression, minimal control in relationships, and decreased self-efficacy. These effects may prevent abused women with STDs from making behavioral changes to prevent recurrence and transmission of disease. Life history methodology was used to understand the context of the interrelationships between STD and woman abuse in 30 Mexican American and African American women's lives. A focus on the context of abused women's partner relationships and aspects of personal control within these relationships may facilitate effective behavioral change, risk reduction, and subsequent decrease in incidence of STDs and woman abuse.

A Black Daughter of the Revolution Frances Smith Foster Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution. By Lois Brown. Chapel Hill: The University Press of North Carolina, 2008. xiv + 690 pp. I am a daughter of the Revolution, you do not acknowledge black daughters of the Revolution but we are going to take that right. Pauline Hopkins, 1905 (qtd. in Brown 537) Therein lies the tale. If we recognize the name Pauline Hopkins, we know her as editor of the Colored American Magazine and author of Contending Forces, Hagar's Daughters, Winona, and Of One Blood. We would not be surprised, would generally expect, that her biographer would validate Hopkins's reputation for fierce insistence upon national citizenship and racial and gender equality by quoting or alluding to the titles of her best-known works. However, Lois Brown chose to title her densely researched epic Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution and to build her reconstruction of this "fifth-generation New England writer, feminist, and public intellectual" with a self-definition, at an occasion, and on a site redolent with a legacy of freedom fighting and resistance (16). In so doing, Brown eschews the obvious characterization of a solitary, feisty female in favor of a scion and regional representative, an example and exemplar, a subject and a metaphor. In so doing, Brown manifests a central cause and effect of Hopkins's and other early African American women's lives and letters and becomes herself another "black [daughter] of the Revolution." Hopkins's and Brown's perspectives on and practices of life writing are characteristic of African American women's literature, especially that of the nineteenth century. They use words as weapons, practice art as activism, combine [End Page 433] personal narratives and political prognostications to test the abilities of language as testimony, testimony as witnessing, witnessing as influencing, impacting, and changing. To better understand and appreciate the contribution that Brown makes with her biography, we need to look back and to look around at what has been done in the African American autobiographical tradition and at what we need to do if we are to write honestly and effectively about it. Using writing as fighting is a tactic rife with complex and sometimes conflicting imperatives.1 Art enlisted for a cause must avoid the captivity of propaganda. Aesthetic activism requires and exploits subtle directness and wide-lens focus. It assumes naïve readers but needs readers who are experienced with word weaponry. Titles become forays. Seemingly simple or excessively detailed, they signify more than meets the eye. For example, in 1836, Jarena Lee's autobiography The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a coloured lady; giving an account of her call to preach the gospel indicates that Lee intends to record her personal material history but with a focus upon her spiritual development. Designating herself as "a coloured lady" invites comparison with Hopkins's "black daughters" not simply by calling attention to themselves as women of color but by their mufti that displays a status regularly denied women of African descent. Lee is a "lady." Hopkins is a "daughter." Like Hopkins, Lee not only confronts racism but sexism as well. Each writes as an infiltrator in male-dominated fields and claims a share of that territory for themselves and for other women. In 1846, one of Lee's fellow itinerant ministers and occasional traveling companions published Memoirs of the Life, Religious Experience, Ministerial Travels and Labours of Mrs. Zilpha Elaw, An American Female of Color: Together with Some Account of the Great Religious Revivals in America. This title not only reinforces the work of Lee but skirmishes with traditions that assumed women should not write histories. Reading Elaw's Memoirs comparatively with Lee's Life moves the characterization of these individual women as defiant, religious fundamentalists to members of a religious sisterhood, illuminates their literary kinship, and reveals signifying as more than a rhetorical technique in oral African America. Titles tell part of the tale. Some narrators also tended to acknowledge multiple motives. Elizabeth Keckley penned a similar palimpsest, Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, she says...

Remembering Alton Parker Hornsby, Jr., 1940–2017

Research with ethnically diverse women has found that friendships can enhance women's health and mental wellbeing (Greif & Sharpe, 2010). Sister friends can be crucial in assisting African American women and women of ethnically diverse backgrounds to face, address, and overcome, major transitions including stress and traumatic stress. Through a reflection and analysis of the relationship with a sister friend, the author explores the strength and challenges of sister friendship as well as therapeutic value. Recommendations are provided for sisterhood as a clinical intervention as well as for women therapist's self care. A case study of an African American woman in need of mutual sister friends is summarized. This exploration is shared through a womanistic psychology.

Conceptualizations of the role of racism and sexism in African American women's lives suggest that racism and sexism may have unique and interactive links to psychological distress. Path analysis was used to examine concomitantly these links for a sample of 133 African American university and community women. Respondents'·self-reported experiences of perceived racist and sexist events and psychological distress were gathered. Results indicated that perceived racist and sexist events correlated positively, and comparably, with psychological distress; but when examined concomitantly, only perceived sexist events accounted for unique variance in psychological distress. Furthermore, racist and sexist events did not interact to predict distress. The substantial correlation between reports of racist and sexist events and the overlap in their relations to psychological distress suggest that the constructs of racism and sexism may, at least in part, be fused for African American women.

Black Women and Historical Wellness Kimberly Akano (bio) Stephanie Evans's Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, Albany: SUNY Press, 2021 Amid individual, interpersonal, and sociopolitical stressors, what resources have Black women leveraged to care for themselves and their communities? For some like Harriet Jacobs or Angela Davis, stretching served as a lifeline for dealing with physical confinement during periods of enslavement or imprisonment. For Black women like Anna Julia Cooper, writing and mindfulness nurtured their intellectual health while navigating challenging academic institutions. Still, others such as Eartha Kitt and Tina Turner found comfort while moving their bodies to accomplish daily household chores—out of view from the public eye that typically followed them. For all of these women, such strategies formed the building blocks of robust practices that aligned the mind, body, and spirit. These women and many others are part of a larger tradition of Black women's embodied efforts to pursue health and healing. In Black Women's Yoga History: Memoirs of Inner Peace, historian Stephanie Evans traces an expansive history of Black women's ideas surrounding mental health and physical well-being as they navigate stress and trauma in their everyday lives. This history decenters an emphasis on South Asian and white American iterations of yoga to shed light on African and African American contributions to yoga history—what she ultimately calls "Africana yoga" (365). By adopting a capacious understanding of yoga to include prayer, exercise, and meditation practices, Evans argues that African American women's pursuit of wellness is anything but new. Instead, Black women's healing traditions reflect an enduring legacy of "historical wellness," the sustained ways of being and knowing that Black women apply to prioritize individual and communal health (364). For Evans, a [End Page 329] historical wellness approach to Black women's understandings of wellness requires situating their healing traditions within the larger context of Black women's struggles against racism, sexual violence, and the many other challenges that threaten African American women's flourishing. In doing so, she reorients readers toward a critical examination of the role that both gender and race play in histories of mental and physical health—an aspect that is sorely understudied within most scholarship on yoga. This approach also seeks to consider how the experiences and epistemological contributions of Black women "show us inner peace is possible, historical, practical, and teachable" (136). As a work of intellectual history, Evans attends to a selection of Black women's memoirs and autobiographies to analyze how African American women have narrated their stress management strategies over time. In particular, she focuses on the writings of Black women senior elders (those age seventy and above) and Black women midlife elders (those age fifty and above). Evans situates these writings before and after 1975 when the first issue of Yoga Journal, a national publication, gained national attention. Using her method of "narrative portraiture," Evans artfully weaves biographical data with historical analysis to provide robust depictions of African American women's lives (43). These portraits offer an intimate look at subjective experiences of loss, trauma, and healing. They also suggest that past and present socio-political developments such as enslavement, the Great Migration, and the #MeToo movement required African American women to assess and refashion their varied approaches to health over time. For example, Evans gestures toward an increasing need for Black women to reconsider how nuanced understandings of wellness may positively contribute to more contemporary conversations about social media usage, classroom pedagogy, and public health policy. Indeed, rather than settling for one-dimensional portrayals of Black women that overemphasize life's trials or triumphs, Evans considers the "beautiful, ugly, and healing" moments that inform the dynamism of African American women's wellness writings (36). Perhaps one of the most striking examples of what Evans ultimately calls "Africana yoga" involves Rosa Parks's dedicated yoga practice, which, in part, sustained her lifelong commitment to activism. Evans's keen analysis of Rosa Parks's engagement with yoga stands as an apt illustration of one of her primary assertions that "it is political for Black women to claim ownership or possession, of their own bodies" (47). In other words, Black...

Introduction and Purpose The literature is becoming replete with studies that address the issue of sexism in the lives of women seeking full participation in the academy (Aguirre, 2000; Finkel, Olswang, & She, 1994; LeBlanc, 1993; Sandler, 1993). Volumes upon volumes record the injustices and frustration women have faced in higher education. There have been numerous reports of wage inequities, vague publishing expectations, ambiguous tenure requirements, limited access to certain academic disciplines, lack of mentorship and networking opportunities, and exclusion from strategic decision-making positions (Burgess, 1997; Finkel, et al., 1994; Warner & DeFleur, 1993). In much of this research, women are classified as a singular group not taking into consideration the impact that race may contribute to any one of these variables if the whole group were broken down into separate ethnic groups and investigated. For instance, based upon the long and turbulent history of race relations in the United States, a person would be remiss to assume historical ideologies (inferior vs. superior) created by a White male patriarchal system have no bearing on the experiences of African American and other women of color in higher education today (Amott & Matthaei, 1996). However, this is not to imply that White female academicians have not suffered because of the system in existence; rather, it simply infers that because of their ethnicity, their academic experiences have not been shaped by the intersections of race and gender as have those of women of color. It is precisely these overlapping socio-cultural factors (e.g., race, gender) that require an examination of the experiences of African American women to be placed within the proper social and political contexts in which their realities are constructed (Collins, 1990; Hurtado, Milen, Clayton-Peterson, & Allen, 1999). A number of studies have attempted to explain the status of African American women in higher education. However, what generally occurs in many of these studies is that the experiences of Black women are compared to those of other women, usually White women, to verify whether or not they are meeting some arbitrary standard of normalcy in the academy (Miller & Vaughn, 1997). Naturally, these findings will explain the experiences of some African American women in higher education. However, they are limited in their analysis because they do not take into account the legacy of race and gender relations in shaping the lives of African American women in society in general and in higher education more specifically (Collins, 1990; Gregory, 1995). Furthermore, these studies do not reveal how African American women interpret their experiences in predominantly White institutions, nor do they allow the women to discuss how socio-cultural issues affect their overall academic citizenship. These studies are also limited in their representation because they fail to consider the variation in responses that will be obtained from any two Black women as a result of their individual differences and personal experiences (Collins, 1990; Hurtado et al., 1999), which will ultimately influence how the women respond to interactions in their academic roles (Holmes, 1999). The purpose of this article is to present findings of a qualitative study conducted to investigate the academic experiences of selected African American women faculty employed by four-year predominantly White institutions. I started this line of inquiry as a graduate student attending a large predominantly White institution. As an African American woman, I was concerned with the small number of African American women faculty I encountered during my graduate program. Of equal concern was the lack of literature regarding Black women in the academy, as well as the substance of the available literature. I was particularly interested in examining the women's experiences within the context of race and gender because extant literature suggests that these constructs shape the academic roles of African American people in higher education (Collins, 1990; Thompson & Dey, 1998; Turner, Myers, Creswell, 1999; Miller, & Vaughn, 1997). …

More attention has recently focused on the psychological experiences of women survivors of sexual assault. However, little work has examined the experiences of African American women survivors, particularly with regard to the impact of race and class on survivors' experiences. We address these limitations by presenting a socio-historical analysis of African American women's rape experiences. This analysis considers the relationship between sexual and economic oppression in African American women's lives. Second, we discuss the influences of these socio-historical factors on African American women's post-assault experiences. Finally, recommendations for therapy with African American women survivors are provided.

More History Than Myth:African American Women's History Since the Publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? Jessica Millward (bio) "History is supposed to give people a sense of identity, a feeling for who they are, and how far they have come. It should act as a springboard for the future. One hopes that it will do this for Black women, who have been given more myth than history." —Deborah Gray White1 At the time of its initial publication in 1985, Ar'n't I a Woman? was among a small, though significant, number of works focusing on the experiences of slave women in the United States.2 Calling critical attention to the world of female slaves, White interrogated stereotypes and historical inaccuracies about bondwomen by highlighting their experiences from childhood to adulthood. At the heart of White's study was the argument that life under bondage fostered an alternative definition of womanhood for African American women.3 Chattel slavery produced life conditions fundamentally separating White and African American women in the United States, prior to and after the Civil War. While White and Black women may have lived under a paternal, patriarchal structure, race-based experiences nonetheless divided them. As the first book focusing entirely on slave women, it is not surprising that Ar'n't I a Woman? continues to be one of the most important books ever produced on the subject. In the two decades since the publication of Ar'n't I a Woman? the study of African American women's history has gained considerable prominence in the American historical canon. African American women's intellectual work, historical contributions, social circumstances, and political participation are noted in countless articles, manuscripts, and dissertations.4 Discussions of African American women's nearly four-hundred-year existence in what became the United States reach back into the colonial era and rush forward into the twenty-first century. Much of this turn in the literature owes a great intellectual debt to questions raised and synthesized in Ar'n't I a Woman? Although White's work centered on slavery, the scholarly questions articulated by White continue to guide the writing of Black women's history in general. In particular, scholars focus their attention on three broad categories: the first being the long-standing debate on race and feminism; the second articulating the relationship between resistance, activism, and power; and the third centering on violence, sexuality, and the body. These topics respond to particular social and historical circumstances such as [End Page 161] slavery, emancipation, and welfare reform; however, they are not historically specific. Rather, they are salient currents in the dialogue between the myths surrounding African American women and their actual lived histories in the United States. Pervasive stereotypes about African American womanhood permeate social, political, and economic realities in the twenty-first century and inspire scholars to aggressively dismantle the notion that all Black women fit into one of three categories presented by White: the asexual mammy, the hot-tempered sapphire, and the wonton jezebel. In doing so, the canon of studies produced in the generations after Ar'n't I a Woman? highlights the multiplicity of African American women's identities in the United States. Race and Feminism Feminism(s), like the writing of Black women's history, is multilayered. Just as scholars realize that a taxonomy of differences based on class, educational attainment, and political orientation orders relationships between African American and White women, they also produce differences among Black women. Thus for historians of African American women, articulating the relationship between feminism and the writing of Black women's history is as challenging now as it was for White in 1985. White found that Black women came to their protofeminist consciousness through lived experiences in bondage. Slave women did not have access to such formal institutional frameworks as the church and educational settings. Rather they fashioned a distinct worldview that aided them as they negotiated their new lives after the Civil War. Thus while White women endured their own "race-determined sexism," writing African American women's history forces scholars to investigate how race determines their feminist consciousness.5 The African American community...

In the early twentieth century, African-American women in the southern United States faced double oppression as a result of patriarchy and racism. They strive to reclaim their independence, all the more so when they are bound by their marriage. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is Zora Neale Hurston's magnum opus, which chronicles the objectification of a young African-American woman called Janie Crawford during her marriage. Through the lens of Black Feminism, this research aims to identify the many forms of female objectification present in the novel and to ascertain the responses taken by the main character in response to the objectification. This research makes use of Martha Nussbaum's and Rae Langton's objectification ideas. Additionally, this study employs Kumea Shorter-Gooden's resistance strategies to evaluate the main character's strategies for resisting objectification. Janie Crawford was subjected to nine distinct forms of objectification by both her first and second husbands, Logan and Jody, according to this study. Additionally, this research illustrates how Janie Crawford's opposition to objectification is fueled by the concept of self-definition. In general, the findings indicate that the novel is centered on the problem of women's objectification and is a timely representation of African American women's lives in the early twentieth century.

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in Antebellum City. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. 212. Cloth, $55.00)Reviewed by Rita ReynoldsThe history of African American women has evolved over past 25 years at a relatively slow pace when compared with African American history in general. Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in Plantation South, published in 1985 (New York), was one of first books to consider African American slave women as scholarly subjects in their own right. Jean Yellin Fagan's efforts to prove Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl was fact and not abolitionist fiction validated Jacobs's work as historical document. Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family from Slavery to Present (New York, 2009) did much to unravel dynamics of race, class, and gender for laboring black women in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In like manner Catherine Clinton reevaluated complexities of life for domestic southern slave women and for wealthy white women whose seemingly neverending needs they tended to in antebellum South.Erica Armstrong Dunbar explores how African American women in Philadelphia experienced transformation from slaves to free women of color beginning in colonial period to Civil War. Dunbar builds on solid historical scholarship on Philadelphia's free people of color by Julie Winch and Gary Nash, to name just two. But what makes this work different is its focus on what Dunbar calls regular slave and free black women of period (2).Dunbar's main argument is that, as freedom came in degrees to slave women who were last to truly experience benefits of freedom, 19th century Philadelphia served as a rehearsal for emancipation in post-Civil War era across nation (3). By using black women's friendship albums, church records, labor contracts, and personal correspondences, Dunbar is able to tell story of both wealthy literate and impoverished illiterate black women in a logical, well-documented, and convincingly argued manner.Dunbar's relatively short volume does a great deal to reconstruct gendered world in which antebellum urban black women struggled. She begins with economic and political importance of slavery in colonial Pennsylvania and argues that while Pennsylvania was considered the best poor man's country, Quakers, regardless of their religious beliefs, relied on slave labor. When Peculiar Institution came to an end during early national period Africans and African Americans moved toward a new kind of unfree labor - indentured servitude. Black women suffered greatest hardship because those born before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for life, and their children born after that date would remain in bondage for not more than 28 years. …

African American women continue to experience disparities in health status when compared to their European American counterparts, yet, often their unique perspectives are not presented in the nursing literature. This article will discuss various theoretical frameworks arising from Black women's thought and reality that can be used to enhance and expand transcultural nursing knowledge. Historical, sociocultural, and literary perspectives will be used to illuminate the realities of African American women's lives. Selected frameworks arising from these realities will be discussed that recognize the impact of race, class, and gender on the lives of African American women and have the potential to guide nursing research and practice.