Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women's History and Black Feminism

Abstract

One generally agreed-upon task of women's history is to see what happens when we place women at the center, rather than the margins, of history. In the past ten years, an abundance of useful and fascinating studies of African American women have done just that. By recognizing that women played a crucial role in African American institutions, social life, politics, and reform, this growing body of scholarship has reshaped the dominant historical narrative of twentieth-century African American history. A greater understanding of respectability politics, particularly in the Progressive Era, and an appreciation for the pervasiveness of debates about respectability within the African American community are two important insights regarding African American politics and reform to come out of this recent scholarship. Three newly published books expand upon this topic. Two of the works in this review explicitly use respectability as an explanatory focus. Victoria Wolcott delves deeply into the historically specific meanings of respectability in interwar Detroit, while E. Frances White uses respectability in a chronologically and definitionally expansive sense as an ongoing issue affecting not only Progressive-Era activism, but also contemporary scholarship. The third work, Patricia Schechter's intellectual biography of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, does not use the concept as explicitly, but, because Wells-Barnett's activism spanned the rise of respectability politics and its period of greatest influence, Schecter's study demonstrates the sometimes devastating personal and political impact of the concerns and obsessions which lie at the heart of respectability politics. Together, these three works suggest a range of ways respectability can illuminate African American life and history. [End Page 212]