The ‘Organized Anxiety’ of Labour Leader Nannie Helen Burroughs

Abstract

Educator and labour leader Nannie Helen Burroughs and her colleagues at the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW) experienced ‘organized anxiety’ during the early twentieth century as they worked to establish a comprehensive labour reform movement in the United States. Burroughs’ colleague and NACW leader Fannie Barrier Williams coined the term ‘organized anxiety’ to describe Black women’s politicized emotions that fuelled their expansive organization as they worked to build a truly democratic society. NACW members, such as Burroughs, integrated their fight for labour rights into their larger movement for women’s suffrage and civil rights. Burroughs established a school and women’s organizations to challenge ideologies and institutions that confined Black women to low-wage service work and denied them full citizenship rights. In this article, I draw from Hochschild’s emotional labour theory, which brings women’s ‘invisible’ work into view, and Williams’ organized anxiety concept to examine Burroughs’ unrecognized, yet critical work of developing and leading a labour reform movement for Black women in a country that denied their very humanity.