Beyond the Classroom: The Organizational Lives of Black Female Educators in the District of Columbia, 1890-1930

Abstract

The availability of both professional and non-professional job opportunities, coupled with the lure of the city, encouraged the steady migration of professionally-trained and unskilled black workers to the District of Columbia during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As was the case with black men, educated professional black women were drawn to the District by the greater opportunities for professional employment at such institutions as Freedmen's Hospital, Howard University, and the District's colored public school system. As the seat of the Federal Government, Washington, D.C., offered a large number of clerical positions to female jobseekers, especially during the years of World War I. The federal dicennial census taken of the District population in 1860 reported that the black female population totalled 8,402; ten years later, it had risen to 24,207, representing a three hundred percent increase. By 1890, the black female population numbered 41,581, and forty years later (1930), it had increased to 69,843.1 Prevalent sexual attitudes as well as racial attitudes limited the job opportunities of educated black women. For black as well as