Experiences Of Black Women Research Articles

Black Women and Music: More than the Blues (review)

Reviewed by: Black Women and Music: More than the Blues Monica Hairston (bio) Black Women and Music: More than the Blues. Edited by Eileen M. Hayes and Linda F. Williams. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. 261 pp. In a discussion of traditional divisions of labor between musicology and ethnomusicology and how those divisions "have influenced the study of black music, or perhaps better, how [black music] has influenced these divisions," musicologist Guthrie Ramsey suggests that black music or "blackness" tends to upset the disciplinary apple cart. That black music is always already constructed as Other in relation to these fields of musical inquiry results for Ramsey in methodological approaches that, in seeking their "intellectual" and "ethnic" center, are eclectic and often in tension with one another.1 While I can and do relate, I also wonder what happens to the apple cart when the blackness in question is also female. Often, black music scholarship not only privileges male cultural producers but also reflects the chronological or great man narrative forms of traditional musicology. When the musicking of African American women is considered, does the cart explode? Black feminist interventions in music studies have the potential to blow up or at least supremely complicate questions of audience, beauty, authenticity, meaning, authorial voice, and/or identity in music (to name just a few). Or does the cart remain untouched? As coeditor Eileen Hayes points out in her introduction, "New Perspectives in Studies of Black Women and Music," even "feminist ethnomusicologies have yet, by and large, to incorporate 'multivocal, interdisciplinary thinking' regarding 'race' in a way that makes a difference both politically and intellectually" (4). As a scholar of black music and specifically of black women making meaning for themselves and others in and [End Page 96] through music, I know, to borrow a term from Gwendolyn Pough's essay, that black women's music can and does bring multiply determined wreck to the apple cart in question. The ten powerfully interdisciplinary essays in Black Women and Music stand as example. They do so in part by issuing "a corrective to discursive practices that inadvertently make invisible as much as illuminate the heterogeneity of black women's musical experience," as Hayes articulates (6–7). The heterogeneous reality of African American women's musical activity is on full view; represented here are those who have worked in or are working in the fields of classical, electric blues, hip-hop, jazz, gospel, musical theater, and the avant-garde. These musicians are vocalists, instrumentalists, composers, conductors, emcees, and announcers, and, tellingly, the collection draws not only from musicology and ethnomusicology but also from rhetoric and theater, English, women's studies, writing, and performance. As the back cover states, Black Women and Music is the "first interdisciplinary volume to examine black women's negotiation of race and gender in African American music." Furthermore, it is not chronological, is not meant to be comprehensive, and does not invest in canon building. However, it does present an impressively wide range of experiences, questions, genres, and approaches organized in three broadly thematic sections. The first, "Having Her Say: Power and Complication in Popular Music," considers forces of gendered and racialized regulation in hip-hop, electric blues, and musical theater as well as how they are negotiated by artists and audiences. The second section, "When and Where She Enters: Black Women in Unsung Places," references the work of both Paula Giddings and Anna Julia Cooper and considers black women's musicking in under-examined contexts such as those of the gospel announcer, the contemporary jazz musician, the jazz avant-garde, and "women's music" scenes. The third and final section, "Revisiting Musical Herstories," serves as a significant addition to and critique of feminist musicology's reclamation project(s), which seldom include efforts to recover black women's histories or account for the factors that have historically marginalized their efforts. In her essay "Hip-Hop Soul Divas and Rap Music: Critiquing the Love That Hate Produced" Gwendolyn Pough examines the contradictory sexual politics inherent in hip-hop through the frame of bell hooks's notion of "Love as a Practice of Freedom."2 The theoretical frame allows Pough to see a...

Black women and music: more than the blues

This collection is the first interdisciplinary volume to address black women's negotiation of race and gender in African American music. Contributors explore ways African American women musicians of the twentieth century have negotiated feminisms, engaged in social activism, and worked within - or sometimes independent of - a male-dominated music industry. Individual essays examine the experiences of black women in classical music and in contemporary blues: the history of black female gospel-inflected voices in the Broadway musical, contemporary electric guitarists in the blues, and hip-hop feminism and its complications. With a focus on black women in previously under-examined contexts, authors introduce readers to the work of a prominent gospel announcer, to performers of women-identified music, and to women affiliated with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The authors place black women's social identities and experiences at the centre of their analyses and establish a theoretical basis for examining black women's music-making, not only historically, but during the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Becoming free in the cotton South

Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War. This boldly argued work focuses on a small place - the southwest corner of Georgia - in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women's experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery's demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O'Donovan's significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced. Becoming Free in the Cotton South is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.

The trouble between us: an uneasy history of white and black women in the feminist movement

The Trouble Between Us looks at the question why a radical interracial women's movement did not develop in the 1960s and 1970s. It consideres white and black women's experiences in the civil rights movement, the Black Arts and Black Power movements, including the Black Panther Party, Boston socialist feminism - particularly Bread and Roses, an early white socialist feminist organization, and the Combahee River Collective, a black socialist feminist organization, and Boston feminists' efforts to develop cross- racial political projects in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The accepted interpretation of this period's feminism has been that African American wmen did not join the women's movement because it was racist. But while radical white women were often unconciously or abstractly racist, they were passionately anti-racist in their political objectives and worked hard to develop an interracial movement. At the same time, most radical black women were influenced by the Black Power movement and as a result many were not interested in joining the early white women's liberation movement. Young activists had begun with ideals of togetherness and found themselves divided and estranged, struggling to retain a hopeful image of interracial community. Race came between young white and black radical feminists. Movement women, particularly whites, were forced to relinquish idealistic and universalist images in order to recognise their own social benefits. In their different ways, whether because white women were priviledged and unable to understand subtle versions of racism, white and black men were sexist, or because white women's feminism did not clearly include a place for balck women, they all had to let go of preconceived images and hopes. Only then were they able to construct relationships based on who they were and not on who they wanted to be or wanted others to be. This book argues that white feminists and feminists of colour were pioneers in America's understanding of white racism and in anti-racism practices and consciousness.

Ar'n't I a Woman?, Gender, and Slavery Studies

t is hard to believe that Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I a Woman? is twenty years old, for the questions it raised about private lives under slavery remain vibrant, resonant, and timely. It is a wonderful text to teach. I direct my students to the clarity of its style—the strong topic sentences, the care- fully built paragraphs, the clearly stated lines of argument. These are not to be taken for granted in this era of complicated writing. One of the most important virtues of Ar'n't I a Woman? for undergraduate teaching is its bittersweet depiction of enslaved people's lives. In my course Slavery in United States History and Culture I immediately expose students, in much greater depth than most have learned before, to the nature of power—in this case, racist power and its impact on individual lives. Told from the perspective of enslaved people, the history of the antebellum South is a daunting one. For many students, the myth of moonlight and magnolias—of Gone with the Wind—holds sway. So after establishing in the first third of the course the truth of the brutality that upheld the plantation South, we then begin to consider how enslaved people, despite the brutality of the conditions they lived under, created family and community relationships that sustained them. Ar'n't I a Woman? provides us with a gendered understanding of the slave community and relationships between enslaved men and women that avoids the competitive tone of the works of the 1970s. White's work focuses on the distinctive role of women in slavery without diminishing the role of men. At the heart of the book is the recovery of the experiences of black women, but that recovery does not occur in isolation from black men. White took to task previous historians of slavery who implicitly, explicitly, and carelessly defined slaves as male and ignored slave women, who are everywhere but nowhere in the literature. 1 When Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report, Negro Family: The Case for National Action, appeared in 1965, most historical works on slavery had already created a vision of the slave family as dysfunctional and (with the possible exception of Herbert Aptheker's 1943 American Negro Slave Revolts) of slave men as emasculated: deprived of their proper roles as heads of households by paternalistic masters; rendered permanent boys by white owners; unable to protect their wives and children from physical, emotional, and sexual incursions by masters and overseers (mistresses rarely, if ever, figured in these discussions); and limited in their ability to engage emotionally with children or lovers. The 1965 Moynihan report transported to the realm

Black Milwaukee

In his response to commentaries on Black Milwaukee, Joe William Trotter Jr. not only provides insight into his own intellectual journey toward a class-based analysis of the black urban community but acknowledges the salient limitations of the proletarianization thesis, particularly vis-à-vis the experiences of black women as outlined by Rhonda Williams. Among the specific arguments of contributors to this volume, however, he gives substantial attention to Will Jones's notion that proletarianization entailed acceptance of a “teleological model of modernization,” Wendell Pritchett's suggestion that perhaps urban historians have perceived Black Milwaukee as primarily a labor study and overlooked its contributions to urban history, and Roger Biles's query about the generalizability of the Milwaukee experience to other industrial cities. Professor Trotter concludes with reflections on the changing state of the field of African American urban history and how he might write a history of blacks in Milwaukee today.

Coping in Isolation

This exploratory study used a critical hermeneutic, which combined Black feminist epistemology and Gadamerian hermeneutics, to understand the experiences of Black middle-class women who relocated to the Pacific Northwest, a predominately White community. Fourteen Black women were interviewed about their experiences living in the Pacific Northwest; specifically, their coping strategies were examined. Although many themes emerged, the interpretive layer of analysis required of a critical hermeneutic methodology offered an understanding of the simultaneous influence of both racism and sexism on their experiences. Findings revealed that the women felt socially and culturally isolated and the need for support networks and positive racial socialization messages was significant. Findings also reinforced the effect of class and the danger of homogenizing Black women's experiences. Participants' recommendations for recruitment and retention are included.

You Have to Show Strength

Investigating the possible overlap between depressed and presumably strong Black women, this article maintains that women's experiences of depression are both gendered and raced. A review of clinical and popular literatures examining Black women's experiences of depression as well as findings from an interview study with a nonclinical sample of 44 Black women suggest that the discourse of being strong may normalize a distressinducing level of selflessness and powerlessness among such women. Implications of this study include the need to consider the racially specific ways in which women are placed at risk for and experience depression.

Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities

Mignon R. Moore Lipstick or Timberlands? Meanings of Gender Presentation in Black Lesbian Communities C onsider the ways in which the following women explain gender pre- sentation in one black lesbian community: Asa Bambir (age 34, executive assistant): 1 In New York I saw more of this butch-femme thing and I was a little floored by it, a little shocked, like why do people have to play these roles? . . . But at the same time I looked at it in awe because there was a part of my childhood when I really liked wearing boyish clothes, but I never did. . . . So, I was very intrigued by it, and I think over the years I’ve just been allowing that to surface. I really do like wearing boyish clothes. Were you drawn to women who were more feminine looking or less feminine looking? I was definitely drawn to women who were feminine looking, very feminine looking. Lynn Witherspoon (age 33, corporate attorney): When I first started to come out . . . it was interesting because I had this type that I was attracted to, and yet when I was going out I was always attracting the more butch looking women. And I was like, “Oh, I’m carrying this purse,” and all of these other things, you know, all these things you do in the straight community. So I had to change the way I dressed, and I stopped carrying a purse, and I was able to find women who I was more attracted to, to go out with. When I first came out I was wearing makeup; I stopped wearing makeup. Data collection was supported by the Woodrow Wilson Junior Faculty Career Enhance- ment Fellowship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. The Russell Sage Foundation generously supported the writing of this manuscript. I thank Karolyn Tyson, Elaine Harley, Laurie Essig, two anonymous reviewers, and the current and former editors of Signs for their helpful comments. Pseudonyms are used to protect respondents’ anonymity. Following Kath Weston’s (2004) model, I assign surnames to this study’s participants to convey a sense of respect and adult status not always afforded sexual or racial minority group members. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2006, vol. 32, no. 1] ᭧ 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2006/3201-0009$10.00

An Argument for Black Feminist Criminology

This article draws on existing feminist theoretical concepts to develop a Black feminist criminology (BFC), using intimate partner abuse against African American women to examine this pioneering approach. BFC expands on feminist criminology and is grounded firmly in Black feminist theory and critical race feminist theory. BFC recognizes a significant connection between intimate partner abuse against women and structural, cultural, and familial influences. It is argued that BFC aids in a more precise explanation of how Black women experience and respond to intimate partner abuse and how the crime-processing system responds to battered Black women.

Theorizing Black Lesbians within Black Feminism: A Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment

Street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semipublic spaces. Black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race, and by the race of their harasser(s). Black feminists' political vocabulary of intersectional analysis offers a useful framework for portraying the indivisibility of race and gender in black women's lives, but the extension of intersectional criticism to capture black lesbians' political vulnerability within black politics and civic life has been neither automatic nor consistent in black feminist theory. This article invokes the 2003 street harassment and subsequent murder of a black lesbian teenager by a black male assailant in Newark, NJ, both to demonstrate black heterosexual women's interest convergence with black lesbians in black civic life, and to urge black feminists to be less equivocal in holding black men and women responsible for their participation in black patriarchy. This requires the retrieval and redefinition of the political language of culture and behavior from black conservatives who rightly flag the associational aspects of black politics, but who fail to question the gender and sexuality dynamics within these associations and fail to perceive the interplay between civic behavior and intersecting structural inequalities, such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and spatial poverty.I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Politics & Gender for their helpful critical feedback. Thanks also to the participants in the Philadelphia Political Theory Workshop, held at the University of Pennsylvania (September 2005), and to Temple University's Conference on Black Civil Society in American Life (September 2005) where I presented an earlier version of this article, as well as to Reuel Rogers and my research assistant Greg Graham.

Biculturalism, Code-Switching, and Shifting: The Experiences of Black Women in a Predominately White Environment

Biculturalism, Code-Switching, and Shifting: The Experiences of Black Women in a Predominately White Environment

South African Experience of Gender and Affirmative Action: A Research Report

This research report is based on a study carried out to examine the degree of effectiveness of affirmative action in reversing the ills suffered by women in general and Black women in particular on account of apartheid. The main objective is to probe the operationalization of affirmative action in the context of South Africa and to consider if its underlying logic directed specifically at Black women is sufficiently strong to deal with the issue of gender inequality which intersects with other race and class dynamics. Rather than focusing primarily on the experience of Black women the research report probes into the ways affirmative action has been formulated planned initiated implemented and co-ordinated by various agencies and departments of government. The report is based on the view that the ultimate judgment as to the effectiveness and success or otherwise of affirmative action to respond to the challenges of the past and to meet the needs of the previously underprivileged and its ability to foster and innovate ideas that support appropriate intervention strategies remains with the government itself. In 1995 the government of South Africa conducted a socio-economic survey to identify the ways in which the measures adopted in relation to affirmative action have contributed to the understanding of the lives of Black South African women. (excerpt)

Urban Black Women at Midlife: A Counseling Perspective

ABSTRACT Increasingly, the scientific community is publishing literature intended to conceptualize the experiences of women as they navigate through midlife development. Most of that literature is built around a Caucasian norm. In contrast, this naturalistic study explores the midlife experiences of Black women, some of whom identified as Caribbean emigrants and some as African American. An initial focus group of thirteen women met in New York City. Two subsequent meetings were each attended by seven of the original thirteen. Data were analyzed using a grounded theory approach. Results were compared with those of three similar studies: one with rural Caucasian women, one with a group of women who identified as Lesbians, and one with a racially mixed group of urban women. Counseling implications of shared and differing experiences are discussed.

Becoming Entrepreneurs

This study applies the concept of intersectionality to Black women's entrepreneurial activity. Specifically, the author addresses the ways in which race, gender, and class intersect to inform working-class Black women's decisions and experiences as hair salon owners. By placing Black women at the center of analysis, the author explores business ownership from the perspective of a group that has frequently been overlooked in sociology of entrepreneurship research. The findings indicate that race, gender, and class inequalities shape working-class Black women's entrepreneurship in two areas: the process of becoming entrepreneurs and relationships with stylists.

The Voices of Black and White Rural Battered Women in Domestic Violence Shelters*

Abstract: Very little research has examined the experiences of Black and White rural battered women. In this exploratory study of 88 participants, 30 rural battered women who sought assistance from domestic violence shelters in southwest Virginia were interviewed. Black and White rural women's experiences in the shelters, helpseeking, and perceived social support during and after their stay in the shelter were compared. Future research directions and suggestions to improve services are presented.

‘BEND IT LIKE PATEL’

This article focuses on the experiences of Black women and one Indian Hindu woman in football in England. The discussions draw on survey and interview research to theorize gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity. The research represents a questionnaire survey of women’s teams and 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews; seven with players and seven with ‘officials’. The survey provides data on players, coaches and managers at women’s football clubs registered with the Football Association (FA) in the North of England. The questionnaire data on ‘race’, ethnicity and gender demonstrate that football’s organizational structures in the region are White and gendered. The interview data highlights the gendered and racialized experiences of women as they begin to play and continue to play football at the club level. What emerges from the interviews is how ‘racial’ difference is constituted for some women footballers. The article analyses the processes that construct gender and ‘race’ as interlocking systems of relationships by using Glenn’s (1999) theoretical framework identifying three processes through which ‘race’ and gender are mutually constituted: representation, micro-interaction and social structure. We raise both theoretical and methodological issues that indicate the need for further rigorous theorizing in the sociology of sport of women’s interwoven experiences of gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity.

Telling a Critical Story: Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

Telling a Critical Story:Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Laurie McMillan Since the 1970s, the personal voice has been brought to bear more and more often on literary criticism, leading Nancy Miller to describe the 1990s as a time of "confessional culture" that manifested itself in academia with "personal criticism and other autobiographical acts" (But Enough xiv, 1-2).1 Though we have now entered a new century, the trend does not appear to be waning, yet autobiographical criticism is still often greeted with hesitation. While many scholars using personal writing in their criticism claim with Ruth Behar that such work is well-suited to addressing "serious social issues" (B2), critics point out that the personal voice does not actually effect change. Daphne Patai, for example, announces that "personal disclosures" and "self-reflexivity [do] not change reality. [Such approaches do] not redistribute income, gain political rights for the powerless, create housing for the homeless, or improve health" (A52). Despite the clear lack of direct political intervention wrought by personal criticism, however, I am not willing to dismiss it as completely irrelevant to questions of social justice. Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (1983) is one text that shows how self-conscious autobiography can be a useful tool to wield in a politically-motivated critical practice. Three of Walker's essays in particular—"Beyond the Peacock," "Looking for Zora," and "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens"—demonstrate how personal criticism can use performative elements to increase its effectiveness. Walker's particular style of performance involves the use of story narratives that emphasize the highly constructed and textually mediated qualities of her self-representation. Readers are thus encouraged to interpret Walker's writing on multiple levels—not only as personal testimony but also as literary criticism and allegory—effectively bringing the personal voice into criticism without [End Page 107] falling into traps of essentialism. As it renegotiates readings of the past, then, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens demonstrates the way literary criticism can use performative autobiography to influence cultural practices and potentially change material lives. The Debate Over Personal Criticism i. The pros Although the reasons why critics choose to write autobiographically vary enormously, three factors are central to the use of personal criticism in Alice Walker and other writers who are committed to literary criticism as a vehicle for social change. First, autobiography allows scholars writing from traditionally marginalized positions to simultaneously assert the legitimacy of their viewpoints and challenge perspectives that have been presented as disinterested and universal. Pamela Klass Mittlefehldt thus claims the personal voice as a way "to assume the validity and authority of one's voice, the significance of one's experience, and the implicit value of one's insight and perspective" (197). Such a gesture is political in itself on occasions when it challenges ideas about who is allowed to speak. At the same time, autobiographical criticism has the power to change dominant discourses by raising awareness of views outside of the mainstream. Many black feminist critics especially prize the disruptive power of scholarship: Barbara Smith proposes a "highly innovative" literary criticism that the black feminist critic "would think and write out of her own identity" (137), while scholars such as Deborah McDowell and Valerie Smith believe that attention to the experiences of black women may potentially radicalize discourses of race and gender. When followed to its logical outcome, the wariness of false universals and the valuing of multiple viewpoints lead to a vision of literary criticism that perpetually attends to issues of difference. Mae Henderson thus calls for "a multiplicity of 'interested readings' which resists the totalizing character of much theory and criticism" (162). Such a vision may be at least partially realized through autobiographical criticism as it focuses on the local and the particular. Autobiographical criticism may do political work not only by acting as an antidote to universalizing tendencies but also by affirming the value of personal writing, a genre long devalued in its associations with both women and African Americans. The slogan connecting the personal and the political in the Women's Liberation Movement implicitly points to a long tradition of women's writing...

Infant-feeding beliefs and experiences of Black women enrolled in WIC in the New York metropolitan area.

In this ethnographic inquiry, the author explored infant-feeding beliefs and experiences of Black women enrolled in WIC (BWEW) in a New York metropolitan inner city. The study was conducted over an 18-month period and included 319 people (130 BWEW, 116 children, 20 grandmothers, 17 fathers, 11 friends, and 25 other relatives). From this group of BWEW, the author interviewed and observed 11 primiparous key informants during pregnancy and the first year postpartum to see how infant-feeding decisions fit into the context of their everyday lives. The major themes that emerged from analysis include (a) formula-feeding experiences were the norm for most BWEW, (b) life experiences of BWEW included a preponderance of loss and stress, and (c) infant-feeding beliefs of BWEW reflected responses to life experiences. These findings could be used to provide culturally sensitive care for BWEW.

Invited reaction: Black and white women managers: Access to opportunity

AbstractIn a survey of Black and White women managers, Linda M. Hite identifies differences in the managers' perceptions of opportunities available to different race and gender groups. Her findings reveal divergent beliefs about the opportunities for people of color; there is more similarity in Black and White women's views when comparing opportunities for White women and men for getting hired, promoted, receiving salary increases, and other workplace challenges. When making comparisons with either men or women of color, White women are far more optimistic about the opportunities for people of color than are Black women. Hite uses this study to explore the lack of attention to race and racial discrimination among White women, whose views are often assumed to represent all women in management. HRD practice and research can look more closely at the perceptions and experiences of Black women to learn how better to promote their careers, since strategies that increase the number of White women might not be helpful in advancing the careers of Black and other women of color.