Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household by Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson Karen A. Johnson Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household. By Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 215. $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8139-4665-8.) In Jim Crow America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, employment options for African American women with a minimal level of education were limited to domestic labor and agricultural work, especially in the South. As Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson remind readers in Limited Choices: Mable Jones, a Black Children’s Nurse in a Northern White Household, Black women also constituted the vast majority of domestic servants in southern cities and, to some extent, northern cities during this period. Indeed, the intersections of race, gender, class oppression, and geographical location impacted Black women’s work experiences as domestic servants. This was the case of Mable Jones (1909–1995), the subject of Limited Choices. In 1922, at age thirteen, Jones began a long career in domestic service work that took her to Charlottesville, Virginia, and Larchmont, New York. She worked as a household servant until she was eighty-five, well into an era when many Black women gained entry to occupations beyond domestic labor. In Limited Choices, Abel, a historian, and Nelson, a sociologist, examine Jones’s lived experiences. Abel and Nelson, who are biological sisters, note that they wanted to document Jones’s life because they realized that “although she played a major role in shaping our lives, we knew little about hers” (p. 2). Jones began working for their family as a domestic servant in Washington, D.C., in 1944 and, after World War II, in suburban New York. As they explain, “until 1953, she lived with us for long periods of time doing the cleaning, some of the cooking, and a lot of the childcare” (p. 3). Abel and Nelson, who grew up in a Jewish, upper-middle-class family, note that their research gave them “an opportunity to study the impact of the relational dynamics of race, class, and gender not only in the South but also in an affluent northern suburb, during the 1940s and 1950s” (p. 5). They also argue that their personal stories intertwine [End Page 379] with Jones’s in that her domestic labor allowed them to enjoy a privileged lifestyle, while simultaneously disadvantaging her lifestyle, at the intersections of race, gender, and class. Abel and Nelson draw on primary and secondary sources in order to unpack Jones’s lived experiences as a domestic laborer. They have interviewed her pastor, family members, friends, and acquaintances, read a handful of letters she wrote, examined Black newspapers from Virginia, and watched a 1995 interview with her collected by the Ridge Street Oral History Project. Where appropriate, they also interweave their personal family narrative with Jones’s in an effort to portray her experiences as a domestic worker in the North. Additionally, Abel and Nelson draw from extensive historical and sociological literature on institutionalized racism, classism, and sexism in the United States as a way to reconstruct Jones’s biography in sociohistorical context, thereby revealing a broad and objective understanding of the life that she lived. Jones did not leave behind a diary, a compilation of letters, or other traditional primary sources. I argue that this fact puts major limitations on Abel and Nelson’s understanding of Jones’s own thoughts regarding her experiences with domestic labor and structural oppression. Instead, the reader gets only snippets of Jones’s voice. Despite this limitation, the premise of Limited Choices is unique, and the book makes an important contribution to fields including labor studies, gender studies, African American studies, and American studies, to name a few. Karen A. Johnson University of Utah Copyright © 2023 Southern Historical Association