Black Women's Labor Research Articles

“We Know It's a Library”: Black Space, Black Women's Labor, and Radical Black Joy

The Junior Scholars Program (JSP) is a tuition-free youth learning program at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York. At JSP, Damaris, a former JSP instructor, was introduced to Kadiatou, the Schomburg Center's former education and outreach programs manager. They write collaboratively to (re)member the dialectical relationship between Black women's labor, Black Space, and Radical Black Joy.

Uncovering the Transformative Labor in Black Women's Community Work

Despite efforts by scholars to visibilize Black women's community work, we still lack a framework that captures the nuances in the work arrangements of Black women serving and advocating for their communities. Our paper introduces a new conceptual framework, the Continuum of Transformative and Reproductive Labor (CTRL), to recognize this hidden multiform labor of racialized women. The CTRL places community work that reproduces oppressive social structures on a spectrum opposite what we call transformative labor—labor that disrupts systems of oppression. The CTRL framework distinguishes social reproductive and transformative community work along four dimensions, (1) the type of power each produces, (2) workers’ autonomy and leadership, (3) workers’ motivation, and (4) how the work is valued. We explore the utility of the CTRL framework for analyzing multiple types of community work Black women perform by highlighting historical and contemporary cases in two different labor contexts. Ultimately, we make a key contribution to feminist social work; Recognizing the community as a site of social reproductive labor, we create a new framework to acknowledge Black women's labor in the community as distinct in its capacity to transform social systems by resisting the reproduction of racial and gender inequality.

The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal by Joan Flores-Villalobos (review)

The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal by Joan Flores-Villalobos (review)

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Just because it don't look heavy, don't mean it ain't: An intersectional analysis of Black women's labor as faculty during COVID

AbstractThe purpose of our scholarly personal narrative was to examine how COVID‐19 and an increased awareness of anti‐Blackness in the United States have exacerbated our labor as Black women faculty, with particular focus on teaching and service responsibilities. Dill and Zambrana's (2009) four theoretical interventions of intersectionality guided our study, and we situated our composite narratives within structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal power domains. Our four composite narratives included (1) Interest convergence, there is no real true investment in change; (2) Institutional intent versus impact, I don't know how it will be incorporated; (3) Perpetuation of Black women's labor, just because it don't look heavy, don't mean it ain't; and (4) Reclaiming my time, and it's not because I don't like them, but it's because I love me. Implications for practice and policy are discussed.

Riot and Reclamation: Black Women, Prison Labor, and Resistive Desires

This article analyzes an interracial women's strike at Wetumpka State Penitentiary in Alabama in 1934. By centering the prison, it challenges southern Black women's long understood absence from factories and their labor movements. As a site of coerced and unpaid labor, the prison represented one of the many places where Black women worked that was unprotected by nascent pro-labor national legislation. And by analyzing Black women's history of industrial labor resistance at Wetumpka, this article calls attention to how incarcerated Black women's labor struggles diverged from but remained an important part of the state's galvanized labor movement. Rather than searching for a similitude of "free world" labor movements, it argues that incarcerated Black women's oppositional politics looked different, because they stemmed from fundamentally different positionalities. Indeed, their refusal to ally with the state, along withthe relationships that theyformed inside, catalyzedaqueer labor politic.

Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought

This article, a Black feminist mixtape, blends music, interviews, and critical analysis in order to demonstrate some of the ways in which Black women have impactfully engaged with the video game industry. Organized as musical “tracks,” it uses lyrics by Black women performers as a critical and cultural frame for understanding some of the work Black women have done with video games. In prioritizing the personal as not only political but also instructive for how we might think about digital media histories and feminism, each mixtape track focuses on Black women's lived experiences with games. As it argues throughout, Black feminism as defined and experienced by the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s has been an active and meaningful part of Black women's labor and play practices with video games.

Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper

Reviewed by: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women by Brittney C. Cooper Kirsten T. Edwards Williams Brittney C. Cooper. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 2017. 208 pp. Cloth: $95.00; Paperback: $19.95; ebook: $14.95. ISBN: 978-0-252-08248-1 When Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith published their groundbreaking text in 1982, it represented a century-long formulation of Black women's intellectual labor into one organized body of work. It aimed to not only solidify Black women's thought into a unified compendium, but to also put forth Black women's philosophical and political position as a rigorous unit worthy of substantive academic analysis. While All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave stands as a cornerstone text in Black women's studies, its legacy is of the continuing and not culminating variety. The edited collection marked not a conclusion to a long-fought battle, but one beginning to an ongoing war: the war of ideas fought on the battlefield of identity and power. For Hull and her colleagues, the fundamental problem hindering the progression of Black women's studies was/is the fallacious attempt by academics to map Black women's epistemic and ontological relationship to the world onto white1 male frames. These attempts support the "destructive" process of, categorizing all who are not like [white men] as their intellectual and moral inferiors. The [End Page E-8] fact that the works in which such oppressive images appear are nevertheless considered American "masterpieces" indicates the cultural-political value system in which Afro-American women have been forced to operate and which, when possible, they have actively opposed. (Hull, Scott, & Smith, 1982, p. xviii) The above assertion was not new to Black women, but needed to be formally articulated in text to speak to an oppressive academic context that theorized in ways that obscured and erased their influence. The authors' statement spoke not only to white masculinist dismissal of marginalized voices, but also to the foundational distinctions in Black women's ways of knowing and being in the world. These distinctions, if taken seriously, put into serious question the absolution of traditional logic. But Some of Us Are Brave, like the arguments made by Black women before them, additionally recognized the ways white feminist and Black male race theorists often utilized white patriarchal political and philosophical strategies to forward their liberation movements. Strategies that ignored the ways the body is "read as text" (Baszile, 2008, p. 252), therefore participating in (and often encouraging) the silencing of Black women. Since their earliest efforts to enter the public sphere of ideas, Black women have vigorously demanded intellectual analyses that took the body seriously. From Phillis Wheatley to Mary Church Terrell, bell hooks to Melissa Harris-Perry, embodied experience has been the lynchpin of political theorizing. Centering the body is a sharp departure from the predominant philosophical position predicated on the mind/body divide (Ani, 1994; Collins, 1990; Descartes, 1978); a departure that has longed placed Black women's theorizing squarely in the frame of the illogical, if not the un-reasonable. On one level these philosophical barriers have blocked Black women from accessing full humanity under the present terms of the social contract (Mills, 1997; Pateman, 1988). These blockades place Black women in perpetual vulnerability within the body politic fueling a literature base about Black women that has been primarily concerned with physical, mental, emotional, and economic survival. However, at a deeper level, white masculinist frames of logic have made "unvisible" (McKittrick, 2006) Black women's labor as intellectuals and their accompanying theoretical contributions (Baszile, Edwards, & Guillory, 2016). It is here, at the level of ideas that Brittney C. Cooper's formidable Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women enters the enduring conversation. As she alerts the reader on page one, the book is about "Black women as thinkers and intellectuals." Throughout the text, Cooper remains laser-focused on the distinctive avenues to and through social theory provided by Black women. Not abandoning an analysis of bodily vulnerability, like her predecessors, Cooper situates Black...

The Stickiness of Instagram: Digital Labor and Postslavery Legacies in Kara Walker's "A Subtlety"

The Stickiness of InstagramDigital Labor and Postslavery Legacies in Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" Sarah Brophy (bio) From May 10 to July 6, 2014, the African American artist Kara Walker's "A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby" existed as a temporary, site-specific installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York (Figure 1). A maximalist sculpture of polystyrene foam coated in thirty tons of bleached white sugar donated by the Domino Sugar Corporation, standing thirty-five feet tall, stretching seventy-five long, and featuring a face resembling the artist's own, Walker's sphinx-shaped nude was sexualized in ways that evoked "Hottentot," "Jezebel," and "mammy" stereotypes. It symbolized the slave system and the sugar industry's massive appropriation and mystification of black women's labor, including but not limited to sexual, domes-tic, and caring labor. While Walker's sugar sphinx has been extensively photographed and written about, equally significant were the fifteen five-foot tall figures of laboring boys—some made of molasses and resin, others of hard candy—who surrounded her, carrying baskets and field produce. In another ugly image of exploited labor, their decomposition in the heat led Walker to heap up the broken bits of their bodies in the baskets of the few boys who continued to stand (Figure 2). "A Subtlety" thus offered a dazzling iconography of the ongoing legacies of the slavery economy and the continuing effacement—the white-washing—of its brutality. This article explores and assesses the pivotal roles of self-inscription, mediation, and audience participation for Walker's project. I focus on the popularity and impact of the hashtag #karawalkerdomino, which saw six thousand user-generated images posted on social media platforms (primarily on Instagram but also on Twitter and Facebook) during the first two days of the exhibition (Ovation Staff)—a number that [End Page 1] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Installation View of "A Subtlety." Copyright Andrew Burton/Getty Images. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Installation View of "A Subtlety." Copyright Andrew Burton/Getty Images. [End Page 2] eventually rose to more than twenty-five thousand posts (Creative Time). "A Subtlety" directly solicited the making and sharing of vernacular digital photographic images by visitors, a strategy informed by twenty-first-century social media outreach trends in the museum sector (Kaufman) and by relational aesthetics, that participatory, audience-oriented mobilization of the avant-garde that has been a mainstay of art world institutions since the mid-1990s (Balzer 66–67). Through physical signs instructing visitors "not to touch the artwork" but instead to upload images on social media, #karawalkerdomino was built into the exhibition from the outset. Anticipated to be equipped with smart devices, visitors were invited, as the website reiterates, to "help build the Digital Sugar Baby, an interactive 3D version of Kara Walker's marvelous artwork! … This living tribute to Kara's work will evolve over the course of the exhibition. Visit this site each week to see its progress" (Creative Time). The implied premise was that no single shot could encompass an installation built on such an enormous scale, and so visitors' image-making would produce a composite whole from myriad points of view. The result was not only a digital version of the installation but also a successful promotional gambit directing traffic to the website and associated media accounts. The curated online exhibition of "A Subtlety" hosted on the website of the nonprofit arts organization Creative Time, produced by the digital entrepreneurs of its subcontractor Makeable, drew together 17,315 of the Instagram contributions, together with 1,788 from Twitter and 83 from Facebook (Creative Time). Highlighting what Walker has sardonically termed the exhibition's "ridiculously romantic angles" (qtd in Sutton), the selections that constitute the official 3D curated exhibition of "A Subtlety" emphasize the sublimity of the sphinx figure and a largely reverential attitude on the part of the audience. Produced through technological, cultural, and cognitive "filtering" processes that conspicuously "remov[e] unwanted content or impurities" (Walker Rettberg 22), this version of the exhibition's online archive is accompanied by a more disturbing obverse, for the exhibition's main claim to fame...

The Scripto Strikes: James V. Carmichael and Black Women's Labor Organizing in Downtown Atlanta

The Scripto Strikes: James V. Carmichael and Black Women's Labor Organizing in Downtown Atlanta

New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South by Claudrena N. Harold

Reviewed by: New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South by Claudrena N. Harold Marcia Walker-McWilliams New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South. By Claudrena N. Harold. Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 177. $54.95, ISBN 978–0-8203–3512-4.) Despite its broader origins and breadth, the New Negro era is frequently exemplified by the cultural arts and literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, where cosmopolitan urban artists and intellectuals freely expressed and promoted a new black cultural identity from the end of World War I through the early 1930s. Claudrena N. Harold's New Negro Politics in the Jim Crow South is an important addition to the field because it argues that black nationalist politics, labor activism, and political organizing among black southerners were also exemplary of the New Negro era. Harold's text pushes us to consider black people in the South in tandem with the characteristics of the New Negro—"self-assertion and self-possession, a cosmopolitan outlook, race pride, and a strong modernist sensibility" (p. 14). To support her argument linking black southerners to the New Negro era, Harold examines the organizing efforts of black workers and labor activists who fought for equal access to jobs and fair and equal treatment in the workplace while calling out rampant racism within the American Federation of Labor and challenging the right of members of the black elite to speak for the black working class. The efforts of black labor activists resulted in the influential yet short-lived National Brotherhood Workers of America (NBWA). Harold persuasively argues that the struggles of the black working class produced an economics-based black nationalist politics that paved the way for subsequent labor organizing in the South, including A. Philip Randolph's Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The explosion of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) also contributed to and benefited from a New Negro outlook in the South. Black southerners organized local UNIA chapters that built on a nascent working-class race consciousness. The New Orleans division of the UNIA, the most prominent of these chapters, started a free clinic, [End Page 202] an adult school, and community outreach programs and prepared black people for civic leadership. Harold expertly integrates a gendered analysis into the text through her exploration of black women's labor activism and political strivings after suffrage. She features women like Jeannette Carter, a journalist, civil rights advocate, and suffragist who sought to empower black women workers while supporting the black working class through organizations like the NBWA. Harold also highlights the blind spots of prominent black male labor leaders, noting, "A stark contrast existed between the strong cooperation between black women and men at the local level and the glaring omission of women's concerns in the political engagements of black men in more national settings" (p. 40). Further, Harold positions black women as embodying both the New Negro and the New Woman through their determination to vote. Despite intimidation and an outright disregard for their voting rights, southern black men and women organized voter registration and education drives and ran black candidates for political office. Additional chapters on black intellectual thought in the South and the impact of the 1927 Mississippi River flood on black southerners' consciousness provide deeper insight into the scope of New Negro politics. However, many of the activists, intellectuals, and organizing campaigns that Harold examines come from coastal Atlantic cities such as Jacksonville, Florida, New Orleans, Louisiana, and, most frequently, the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. To what extent were black protest activity and New Negro politics evident in more rural and interior portions of the South? New Negro southerners leveraged institutions like the black press and black colleges, but did they utilize other institutions like the black church? Ultimately, Harold's text necessarily expands our understandings of the New Negro era and black southerners, who a generation later became the architects of the civil rights movement. Marcia Walker-McWilliams Rice University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

WORKING OUT THEIR ECONOMIC PROBLEMS TOGETHER: WORLD WAR I, WORKING WOMEN, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE YWCA

AbstractThis article examines how a group of Black and White YWCA staff members seized the opportunities of World War I to advance a racial justice agenda through Young Women's Christian Association programs for working women. First, they created YWCA program work for thousands of Black working women that paralleled the YWCA's Industrial Program, which followed YWCA segregation policies. Second, they made claims for social justice based on Black women's labor contributions, in contrast to both earlier reformers' focus on elite Black women and other wartime activists' focus on soldiers' service. Finally, in a period best known for White people's violent resistance to Black advances, they fostered a program culture and structures that encouraged White working-class women to view African American coworkers as colleagues and to understand racial justice as part of a broader social justice agenda. Arguing that interracial cooperation among working people was crucial to social progress, they made African American laboring women and White working-class allies both symbolically and literally crucial to wartime and postwar civil rights efforts. Their efforts contribute to our understanding of the changing discourse of “respectability” and the impact of World War I on the Black Freedom Struggle.

Black Women's Labor and the Melodrama of Class Mobility in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed

May the work I've done for me , May the work I've done for me , When I'm resting in my grave, there is nothing that can be said , May the work I've done for me . --African American spiritual (1) For the past two decades, scholarship in class studies has traced the literary representation of work in Gilded Age America. (2) As scholars note, struggles over the modes and compensations of labor often emerged through the pages of late nineteenth-century newspapers, religious tracts, and novels, as writers vied for cultural influence to shape readers' sentiments toward work and class. Yet studies seldom have examined how African American writers contributed to these literary mediations of work. As Carla Peterson has observed, this inattention to black labor reflects scholars' privileging of certain interpretive paradigms to the exclusion of others. as well as a narrow focus on only the most canonical postbellum black texts (104). (3) For example, well-known authors Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles W. Chesnutt all wrote about the relation between labor conditions and black advancement in their lesser-known fiction, speeches and essays; however, these authors' most frequently studied novels--Iola Leroy (1892), Contending Forces (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), respectively--belie the writers' fuller engagement with labor issues. (4) In order to recover the discourse of labor in African American literary history, this essay builds upon Peterson's observations by examining a little-studied black narrative whose focus is on work, Sutton E. Griggs's second novel, Overshadowed (1901). The novel's title has unintentionally prophesied its critical neglect. Even as scholars including Arlene Elder, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, and Finnie Coleman have aimed to restore attention to the author's oeuvre, Griggs's second novel is overshadowed by critical attention to his first, Imperium in Imperio (1899). (5) In each of his five novels, published between 1899 and 1908, as well as his nonfiction social theory, Griggs (1872-1933) highlights how African Americans pursue and interpret their work, particularly within racially proscribed labor markets. (6) Yet Overshadowed places work at its center by following Erma and John Wysong, siblings who must forego their life of relative comfort to seek self-sustaining work after their parents' death. Focusing primarily on Erma's precarious work conditions as a black female laborer, the novel features African Americans performing a range of domestic service, self-employment, homemaking, industrial work, imprisoned labor, and professional occupations. As African Americans determine the extent to which their labor can speak for them in shaping their identities, the novel refutes the stigma of physical labor (industrial, service, and manual) to further affirm the work ethic. Yet the text ultimately notes how white prejudice and black intraracial class tensions often inhibit advancement by even the most diligent black workers. Though Griggs's melodramatic novels often have been dismissed as artistically flawed, I argue that in Overshadowed, melodramatic form productively aligns with the novel's thematic focus on labor and class mobility. (7) Characterized by stark changes in characters' social positions, emotional excess and trauma, and life-altering moral choices, melodrama demonstrates the extreme possibilities of an individual's fate. As such, melodrama's multiclimactic narrative structure simulates the serial, sudden reversals of fortune that may occur for workers in an unstable job market, especially for African American female workers facing hiring discrimination, sexual vulnerability, and other unfavorable conditions related to employment. In elucidating how melodrama conveys the exigencies of black women's labor, I draw on Peter Brooks's analysis of the genre as primarily concerned with establishing virtue through trials: The reward of virtue . …

"I Try to Live Somewhat in Keeping with my Reputation as a Wealthy Woman": A'Lelia Walker and the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company

This article examines the marketing strategies of A'Lelia Walker, daughter and coworker of Madam C. J. Walker who manufactured beauty and hair products and built up the extremely successful Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company in the early decades of the twentieth century. Whereas the mother was and still is widely admired as a hardworking "race woman," her daughter is frequently dismissed as a spoiled and frivolous heiress whose conspicuous consumption ultimately undermined the Walker brand. By placing A'Lelia's work for the company within the context of recent scholarship on black labor and consumption, this article suggests that we understand A'Lelia's consumer strategies as a savvy response to the new demands of mass marketing. Furthermore, an analysis of the changing and gendered ideas of consumption in early-twentieth century America reveals that A'Lelia's lifestyle challenged both black and white elites' gendered expectations of respectable consumption and helped to reshape the politics of black women's labor.

Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex

This article explores the role of Black women in the U.S. and Canadian anti-prison movements and argues that anti-prison organizing is a critical site of anti-globalization activism. In the context of domestic economic restructuring, aggressive military interventions abroad and the global spread of neoliberal socio-economic policy agendas, increasing attention has been paid to the multifaceted global justice movement. At the same time, commentators in the U.S. and Canada have noted the underrepresentation of Black participation in anti-globalization activism. By identifying the work that prisons do in absorbing and disenfranchising communities who are surplus to the needs of global capital, and repressing and deflecting dissent to U.S. imperialism, the author reframes anti-prison activism as an overlooked site of global justice organizing. The article identifies six types of antiprison work—human rights advocacy; challenging “post-incarceration sentences”; campaigns for decarceration through legal reform; moratorium activism; abolitionist organizing for alternatives to the prison-industrial complex; and campaigns for the release of political prisoners—and examines Black women's labor as community activists and movement intellectuals in each.

". . so you can see, color makes no difference": Race, Slavery and Abolition in A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life

". . . so you can see, color makes no difference":Race, Slavery and Abolition in A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life Xiomara Santamarina A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life, published in 1859 by freeborn Cincinnati hairdresser Eliza Potter, offers modern readers a voice that contradicts many of our understandings of nineteenth-century African American literature. An exciting first-hand account of work, race, and femininity, this narrative speaks to the possibilities for "working womanhood" that dressing white women's hair offered a Black working woman in the United States before the Civil War. Given that, in her day (as in ours), many Americans considered Black women's labor for white women to be menial and without value, the fact that Eliza Potter published opinionated and largely disparaging insights about the rich white women who were her social superiors is nothing short of remarkable. While we might safely assume that Black working women commonly perceived their white female employers in less than flattering terms, what makes this instance of frankness so singular is that it was published, read, and reviewed by white readers, some of whom were likely the clients she spoke about.1 Alternately irreverent and high-minded, Potter the author delights and scandalizes readers with accounts of social-climbing, or "parvenu," women, all the while never letting her readers forget that she earned high wages and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest beauticians (13). Potter's focus on the foibles of her elite clients and the "domestic bitterness" featured in their lives, combined with a scarcity of biographical data on Potter herself, has kept A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life on the margins of nineteenth-century African American literary studies ("The Author's Appeal" iv). This is a rich field centrally concerned with slavery, racism, and African American activism geared around abolition and uplift. Problematically, A Hairdresser's Experience makes no reference to racial injustices and has a peripatetic [End Page 171] narrator whose central investment is a "desire to see the world" (11), resisting some of our rubrics for literary race relations in nineteenth-century public print spheres. Given what we know about African American women's difficult negotiations of femininity and their racial proximity to slave women in the cultural imaginary, we have to wonder how a Black working woman could have cultivated the kind of authority Potter displays in her text. Could she have been passing for white? Also, how could a Black woman author represent herself as an independent working woman who proclaims her "liberty" in the book's first paragraph and not as a goal to be reached at its end (11)? Elsewhere, I have argued for the importance of A Hairdresser's Experience on the basis of its unconventional insights into the ways that some Black working women were able to shape their identities as entrepreneurs and social critics even when they remained on the political margins of a nation that viewed them as irrelevant (see Belabored Professions). Part travel narrative and part work narrative, A Hairdresser's Experience dramatizes the authorship possibilities enabled by Potter's hard-won economic independence, but it also speaks to the benefits that Potter reaped because she expressed many of the culture's anxieties about the well-being of femininity and classed identity during the nation's commercial expansion (Santamarina 103–38). That is, even if Potter's subordinate race and class made her an unlikely candidate for the role of "social critic," the fact that she articulated many of the anxieties associated with the period's fear of "confidence men and painted women," to use Karen Halttunen's term, offered her legitimacy among her readers that she might not otherwise have had. It would be a disservice to Potter and to her narrative, however, to suggest that the significance of A Hairdresser's Experience resides only in the singular position of its author relative to her employers, her readers, and the text's principal subject matter, elite white womanhood. This autobiographical narrative also speaks to the fact that Potter's travels among southern and northern elites exposed her to dimensions of slavery that often challenged fundamental abolitionist premises...

Sister circle: black women and work

Although black women's labor was essential to the development of the United States, studies of these workers have lagged far behind those of working black men and white women. Adding insult to injury, a stream of images in film, television, magazines, and music continues to portray the work of black women in a negative light. Sister Circle offers an innovative approach to representing work in the lives of black women. Contributors from many fields explore an array of lives and activities, allowing us to see for the first time the importance of black women's labor in the aftermath of slavery. A brand new light is shed on black women's roles in the tourism industry, as nineteenth-century social activists, as labor leaders, as working single mothers, as visual artists, as authors and media figures, as church workers, and in many other fields. A unique feature of the book is that each contributor provides an autobiographical statement, connecting her own life history to the subject she surveys. The first group of essays, It Sista! identifies the sites of black women's paid and unpaid work. In Foremothers: The Shoulders on Which We Stand, contributors look to the past for the different kinds of work that black women have performed over the last two centuries. Essays in Women's Work through the Artist's Eyes highlight black women's work in literature, drama, and the visual arts. The collection concludes with Detours on the Road to Work: Blessings in Disguise, writings surveying connections between black women's personal and professional lives.

Black Women's Labor Market Status: Occupational Segregation in the United States and Great Britain

An initial exploration of the comparative labor market situation of black women in the United States and Great Britain reveals that race and gender play similar roles in allocating people among broad occupations in both nations despite differences in historical circumstances. However, a closer examination based upon measures of occupational segregation shows that labor market dynamics are quite different. Public employment and education do not reduce racial segregation in Britain as they do in the United States, and the immigrant status of many black Britons does not explain these differences. Only youth is associated with reduced segregation in both countries.