The Emergence of Black Women's History

Abstract

Book Reviews The Emergence of Black Women's History Jacqueline Anne Rouse. Eugenia Burns Hope, Black Southern Reformer. Athens , Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1989. xi +182 pp. ISBN 0-8203-1082-4 (d); 0-8203-1464-1 (pb). K. Sue Jewel. From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of U.S. Social Policy. London: Routledge, 1993. xii + 238 pp. ISBN 0-415-08777-5 (cl); 0-415-04253-4 (pb). Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Bapttet Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. xü + 306 pp. ISBN 0-674-76977-5 (cl). Cynthia Neverdon-Morton. Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925. KnoxviUe, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1989.272 pp. ISBN 0-87049-583-6 (d); 0-87049684 -0 (pb). Susan Lynn. Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992. xi + 218 pp. ISBN 0-8135-1867-9 (cl); 0-81351868 -7 (pb). Fon Louise Gordon The studies under review here examine either the work experiences of black women or the images of black women in American society. HistoricaUy, the majority of working black women in American society have been confined to agricultural labor and domestic service or "black women's work," defined as low-paid and menial.1 However, the black women chronicled and profiled in these studies are from the middle and upper dasses, and consequently represent the minority of black women. Their activities remained "black women's work" in that they were striving for the improvement and upfift of their communities and the race. These studies reveal that black women have not constituted a monoUthic group; their very diverse Uves, interests, and activities have been dependent on many fadors. These works all help to expand our definition and understanding of black women's work. K. Sue JeweU's From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond focuses on a concern that has historically been very important to black women: protecting themselves from the negative imagery of blacks in American sodety that arises from the racial caste system. It is a study of the images and © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 128 Journal of Women's History Fall ideology of black women that are produced by the mass media and designed to maintain their position as the lowest members of the sodal hierardhy. JeweU attempts to determine the factors responsible for the sodal, poUtical, economic, legal, and educational debasement of black women. She explains that to focus on poverty, unemployment, Ulegitimacy , and other social problems begs the question. National social poUcies designed to remedy these problems have raised expectations but are ineffedive. But more importantly, the faüure of social policies to elevate black women and the black community is used by whites to advance the notion that blacks are incapable of elevation even with federaUy funded sodal assistance. This anti-black assessment of black women is encouraged by the members of power elites who have established a correlation between group elevation and equal access and encouraged a belief in meritocracy. But Jewell argues that the equal access produced by the QvU Rights Movement aided only the black middle class and not the vast underclass; and that no meritocracy exists because American society is based on ascribed, not achieved, qualities. The power dite has established artifidal constructs and conditions to create dissension among the masses. Among these is a hierarchy based on race, gender, and class. Headed by elite white males, this hierarchy includes class-stratified white males, color-stratified males of color, white women (who share the same race as white males), and color-stratified females of color. Access to the benefits and rewards of society depend on rank in a scale on which black women occupy the lowest status (pp. 1-5). To insure its continued monopoly of the majority of society's resources, the power elite controls not only the means of material production but the production of ideas as wdl. The mass media are used by the power eUte to...