Black Women In America Research Articles

Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives.

Emphasizing work that frees our imaginations and allows us to conceive new theories, new language, and new questions, the collection seeks to establish the nature of Afro-American women's experiences while providing a theoretical framework for feminist thought. In essays that explore the intersection of work and family, socio-historical literature and critiques, and the relation of women to community life, contributors to this volume document Afro-American social and personal struggles and strategies. Individual essays examine family roles, job satisfaction, economic status, and women's traditions in the church. An eloquent introduction to the development of feminist thought, Black Women in America encourages the discussion of broader issues, such as the treatment of cultural diversity in American higher education.

Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved

NAMELESS GHOSTS: POSSESSION AND DISPOSSESSION IN BELOVED Deborah Horvitz* Toni Morrison’s fifth novel, Beloved (1987), explores the insidious degradation imposed upon all slaves, even when they were owned by, in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s term, “a man of humanity.”1 The novel is also about matrilineal ancestry and the relationships among enslaved, freed, alive, and dead mothers and daughters. Equally it is about the meaning of time and memory and how remembering either destroys or saves a future. Written in an anti-minimalist, lyrical style in which biblical myths, folklore, and literary realism overlap, the text is so grounded in historical reality that it could be used to teach American history classes. Indeed, as a simul­ taneously accessible and yet extremely difficult book, Beloved operates so complexly that as soon as one layer of understanding is reached, another, equally as richly textured, emerges to be unravelled. Morrison has referred to her novel as a “ghost story”2 and begins and ends with Beloved, whose name envelopes the text. The powerful corporeal ghost who creates matrilineal connection between Africa and America, Beloved stands for every African woman whose story will never be told. She is the haunting symbol of the many Beloveds—generations of mothers and daughters—hunted down and stolen from Africa; as such, she is, unlike mortals, invulnerable to barriers of time, space, and place. She moves with the freedom of an omnipresent and omni­ potent spirit who weaves in and out of different generations within the matrilineal chain. Yet, Morrison is cautious not to use Beloved as a symbol in a way that either traps the reader in polemics or detaches one from the character who is at different times a caring mother and a lonely girl. Nor is Beloved so universalized that her many meanings lose specificity. She is rooted in a particular story and is the embodiment of specific members of Sethe’s family. At the same time she represents the spirit of all the women dragged onto slave ships in Africa and also all Black women in America trying to trace their ancestry back to the mother on the ship attached to them. Beloved is the haunting presence who becomes the spirit of the women from “the other side.”3 As Sethe’s mother she comes from the geographic other side of the world, Africa; as Sethe’s daughter, she comes from the physical other side of life, death. There is a relationship, too, between Beloved’s arrival and the blossoming of Sethe’s memory. Only after Beloved comes to Sethe’s house as a young woman does Sethe’s repression *Deborah Horvitz is a doctoral student in English at Tufts University working on American women writers. She is also a psychiatric social worker. This paper was presented at Rutgers University and at NEMLA in 1989. of countless painful memories begin to lift. Beloved generates a metamor­ phosis in Sethe that allows her to speak what she had thought to be the unspeakable. In Beloved the ghost-child who comes back to life is not only Sethe’s two-year-old daughter, whom she murdered eighteen years ago; she is also Sethe’s African mother. This inter-generational, inter-continental, female ghost-child teaches Sethe that memories and stories about her matrilineal ancestry are life-giving. Moreover, Beloved stimulates Sethe to remember her own mother because, in fact, the murdered daughter and the slave mother are a conflated or combined identity represented by the ghost-child Beloved. Mother-daughter bonding and bondage suffuses Morrison’s text. Sethe’s nameless mother is among the African slaves who experienced the Middle Passage and, late in the text, she relates that ordeal through a coded message from the ship revealing that she too is a Beloved who, like Sethe, has been cruelly separated from her own mother. This cycle of motherdaughter loss, perceived abandonment, betrayal, and recovery is inherent in and characterizes each mother-daughter relationship in the novel. But in the present tense of the novel—Ohio in 1873—Sethe barely remembers, from so long ago, her own mother, who was pointed out to her by the eight-year-old child who watched over the young...

The meaning and effect of the UN decade for women on black women in America

Thirty Black women activists within different age categories, from varied educational and occupational backgrounds, and representing Black women's organizations from different regions of the U.S. were interviewed to determine their views on the meaning and effect of the UN Decade for Women on the lives of Black American women. Their responses to questions about the Decade indicate that the masses of Black women are poorly informed or totally uninformed about the UN Decade for Women. And, among that segment of the Black female population which is well informed about the Decade, positive views on the benefits of the Decade for Black women correlate strongly with employment in a national women's organization or governmental agency dealing with women's issues, and personal involvement in UN Conferences. Many Black women feel that the opportunity to network with third-world women is the major benefit that Black American women gained from the Decade. They also feel that American racism and class bias effectively prevent equitable implementation of a national plan of action to improve the status of women in the United States.