The Black Matriarchy

Abstract

One recent winter, a black man from a St. Louis ghetto walked the streets looking-in 135 places-for a job. He didn't find one. A white sociologist, Dr. William L. Yancey, who went with him for purposes of research, describes the case as extreme, but says that it nevertheless illustrates how severe is the economic stress that lower class black men must endure. Typically, such stress causes black families to split, since only the mother has access to a steady, if small, income, by way of welfare. And she, in most jurisdictions, cannot receive welfare if there is a man in the house. Even if he should eventually find employment, the returning husband must convince his wife that his job is as secure as her welfare check, which is usually not the case. Constant or sporadic unemployment of ghetto men helps maintain a matriarchy in about one-fourth of the nation's Negro families. Although this fact is not new, its importance has been obscured by descriptions of the black matriarchy as pathological or deviant-a contributor to social disintegration, delinquency and male emasculation. Almost all of these studies have viewed ghetto society through white, middle class eyes. results, many Negroes feel, are inevitably distorted. finding sickness in healthy reactions to a bad situation. Thus, Danial Moynihan, in his 1965 report on the Negro family-which angered black professionals and social scientists-wrote: The evidence . . . is that the Negro family in the urban ghetto is crumbling. A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for vast numbers of the unskilled, poorly educated city working class, the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. Uu family resn.