Black Professional Women Research Articles

The Love Jones Cohort and singlehood are family law issues

AbstractThis article reviews the changing Black family and households. The core theme is to understand the uniqueness of those single and living alone in the Black middle class—the “Love Jones Cohort”—and how their intersecting identities of race, class, gender, and singleness inform their lifestyle, shape how they manage life decisions, and their relationship to policy as well as family law and family court. This essay moves beyond the popularized and omnipresent inquiry: “Why are Black women not getting married?” or “Why are there so many single professional Black women?” This line of questioning throws the spotlight squarely on Black women's individual dating practices, while often ignoring structural factors that undergird those decision‐making processes. It implies that because of the individual actions of the Love Jones Cohort, specifically Black women, they are somehow at a deficiency if they are not married and child‐free, rendering them invisible as a family. This article discusses the legal implications of the presence of the Love Jones Cohort.

Feeling More Black in Portland: Diversity and the Enregisterment of Livability

AbstractThis article examines the relationship between diversity and urban livability in Portland, Oregon, as ideological and pragmatic projects. I argue that diversity enregisters the city as livable, because the progressive ideals that diversity puts forth index one of many innovative approaches that Portland has taken to resolve the challenges of urban life. Black professional women are both rhetors and subjects of this enregisterment process. They are routinely called on to make public arguments about diversity. However, I show that diversity work just as routinely creates situations where the communicable power of whiteness in the city is both evident and maintained. Women describe navigating this dynamic as “feeling more Black in Portland” than anywhere else they have lived. I contend that this feeling of racialized affect is engendered by diversity's subordination to livability—a structural relation that indexes both the neoliberal underpinnings of local belonging and how narrowly the space is constructed to include Blackness and womanhood.

“There’s the Black Woman Thing, and There’s the Age Thing”: Professional Black Women on the Downsides of “Black Don’t Crack” and Strategies for Confronting Ageism at Work

This article problematizes the concept of “Black Don’t Crack” and challenges the universal desirability of youthfulness. This study is driven by two research questions: (1) How does the perceived youthfulness of professional Black workers shape their subjective experience of workplace interactions? and (2) What strategies do Black workers use to assert their expertise and legitimacy when confronted with prejudicial attitudes and interactions based on perceptions about their age? Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews with professional Black women who are perceived as younger than they actually are, this article describes Black women’s experiences with ageism and their specific strategies for combating age bias in the workplace. The focus of this study diverges from most ageism studies focused on bias against older adults. Rather, this article contributes to our understanding of how gendered racism and ageism intersect when Black women’s chronological ages differ from how they are perceived.

‘Demonstrable experience of being a Mammy or Crazy Black Bitch’ (essential). A critical race feminist approach to understanding Black women Headteachers’ experiences in English schools

ABSTRACT This paper builds on the emerging, but significant scholarship of Critical Race Feminism (CRF) in education. It adds to the literature in this area by applying the theoretical and methodological underpinnings to the British education context where such applications are vanishingly small in favour of broader critical race applications. Supported by racialised and gendered images of professional Black women in leadership roles as the analytical standpoint for understanding a Black woman Headteacher’s experiences in an English school, this paper argues that Black women’s tenure and trajectories are underpinned by the white racial colonial logics of the Mammy, Crazy Black Bitch, Superwoman and/or Feisty Sapphire. In so doing, institutional racism continues to underpin and undermine Black women Headteachers’ leadership potential, experiences and outcomes.

Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis by Keona K. Ervin

Reviewed by: Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis by Keona K. Ervin Crystal M. Moten (bio) Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis. By Keona K. Ervin. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017. Pp. 294. $60.00 cloth; $60.00 ebook) Keona Ervin's well-researched Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis is a welcome addition to a growing number of works that examine black people's struggles for economic justice during the twentieth century. Its most important intervention is its focus on the labor activism of a community of black working-class women in the industrial city of St. Louis from the 1930s–1960s. By centering the experiences and activism of black women, Ervin deepens our understanding of the Black Freedom Struggle in the border south. Ervin argues that black working-class women's activism was not simply "contributory" but "generative," meaning that not only did black working women add their voices and bodies to the frontline of economic justice struggle, they also redefined the nature of the struggle and inspired the political activism of other members of the black community in St. Louis, notably middle-class black professional women. With this focus on the generative activism of black working-class women, Ervin demonstrates how black working-class women understood their struggles for economic justice as labor. Ervin also makes the case for the centrality of black working-class women as both bridge leaders and "visible, formal architects of black freedom agendas" (p. 17). Finally, Ervin illustrates the ways in which the tradition of black working women's economic activism during the 1930s–1960s can be directly linked to the anti-poverty struggles of the late 1960s. Gateway to Equality shines most in Ervin's ability to narrate black working-class women's economic justice activism. For example, Ervin's analysis of nut factory workers succeeds in demonstrating the crucial role black women played in the battle for worker rights and implicating the state for its failure to regulate manufacturing companies, which would then create an open, inclusive industrial labor environment. In addition to traditional archival sources, Ervin [End Page 131] creatively analyzes the lyrics of blues songs to highlight the cultural influence of black working women's activism. Additionally, Ervin uses illustrative chapters that assess the labor activism of domestic workers, housewives, youth activists, and industrial workers. These chapters illuminate the relationship between black working women and the Communist Party, examine how black women authored labor unionism to include themselves, discuss how young black women demanded mainstream businesses hire black workers, and assess how black female industrial workers used their voices to formally register their complaints of unfair treatment and expose discrimination. In this way, Gateway shines a much-needed spotlight on a community of black working-class women who sought to transform the urban industrial landscape. While there is no doubt about the significance of Gateway's contributions, two areas deserve greater attention. First, there is still the tendency to situate black working-class women's activism primarily within a labor union framework. Gateway is significant because it expands our understanding of the possibilities of black women's activism, but situating this activism solely within a labor union context continue to narrow the scope of possibilities for black working women's economic activism. First, labor union activism has the benefit of being able to be traced in the archives and it is no small feat to restore black women's generative activism, there is the danger of missing other forms of black working-class women's economic activism when the narrative only revolves around or near the labor union or union-like organizations. Second, while Gateway aptly demonstrates the ways in which middle-class professional black women were inspired by the activism of black working-class women, there seems to be a missed opportunity to deepen our understanding of the relationship between these two groups of black female activists. In chapters where both groups of women appeared, instead of bringing their activism together, they are treated separately. These points are less of a critique...

A father’s legacy ignites a daughter’s fire

No abstract available.

Race, Gender, and Career: A Critical Look at Marriage and Motherhood Among Black Professional WomenRace, Gender, and Career: A Critical Look at Marriage and Motherhood Among Black Professional Women

Race, Gender, and Career: A Critical Look at Marriage and Motherhood Among Black Professional WomenRace, Gender, and Career: A Critical Look at Marriage and Motherhood Among Black Professional Women

Normative Ideals, “Alternative” Realities: Perceptions of Interracial Dating among Professional Latinas and Black Women

Family types continue to expand in the U.S., yet normative patterns of endogamy and the privileging of nuclear families persist. To understand how professional women of color navigate endogamy and family ideals, I draw on 40 in-depth interviews of professional Black women and Latinas to ask how they construct partner preferences. I find that professional Latinas and Black women prefer same-race, similarly educated partners but report significant barriers to satisfying these desires. Respondents’ experiences with racism, the rejection of ethno-racial and cultural assimilation, gendered racism from men of color, and the college gender gap emerge as mechanisms for endogamous preferences. These preferences resist and support hegemonic family formation, an ideological and behavioral process that privileges, white, middle class, endogamous, heteronormative ideals for families comprising courtship, marriage, and biological childbearing. By challenging the racial devaluation of people of color while preferring the normativity that endogamy offers, the women in this study underscore the fluidity embedded in endogamy.

Pregnancy, Then It's “Back To Business”

This essay theorizes the contours of a post-feminist gender regime that utilizes figures such as Beyoncé in order to hail women as self-governing subjects who make the right choices with respect to career, marriage, motherhood, and the disciplining of their bodies. As a black woman, the narrative about Beyoncé's life and choices has specific implications; it positions professional black women as ideal citizens and mothers and also seeks to reconfigure and normalize representations of the black family. The body, specifically the black female body, plays an important role in attempting to transform and normalize these representations. This essay offers one of the few examinations of black women's relationship to post-feminism. Although post-feminism has been conceptualized in ways that ignore black women, I aim to demonstrate why further consideration of black women's relationship to post-feminism is needed. It is my contention that with successful black women increasingly in the public eye, what they say about feminism and how they relate to feminist politics have important implications for how all women, but especially young black women, engage in types of activism that go beyond placing value on individualism at the expense of the collective.

Black Women and Politics in New York City by Julie A. Gallagher

Reviewed by: Black Women and Politics in New York City by Julie A. Gallagher Rachel Corbman (bio) Gallagher, Julie A. Black Women and Politics in New York City. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2012. For the past three decades, there has been a steady increase in feminist scholarship focused on the history of black women in the United States as part of a larger cross-disciplinary body of black feminist thought. This includes a diverse range of work on free and enslaved women in antebellum America; historical studies of professional black women and black women in the arts; and analyses of the black women’s club movement as well as the involvement of black women in social movements of the twentieth century. With the exception of biographical studies of notable women, however, there has been limited attention to the involvement of black women in the major bastion of centralized power in the United States: electoral politics. Julie A. Gallagher’s Black Women and Politics in New York City is a rare exception to this general rule. Focusing on local and national races from 1910 until the 1970s, Gallagher meticulously traces the history of black women’s political activism in New York through the biographies of more than fifteen black women who forged their careers in Harlem or Bedford-Stuyvesant. The rejoining and in Gallagher’s title is quite crucial. As much as her book is a study of black women politicians, it is also a political history of New York City and the United States more broadly. By specifically studying the history of black women in New York, Gallagher proves that black women have always been a part of America’s [End Page 416] political landscape, even though these women are rarely included in historical accounts—not even histories centered on women. This omission should be familiar to black feminist historians as it was (and still remains) a catalyzing impetus behind the field. However, this does not fully explain why Black Women and Politics in New York City is the first history of its kind and among a limited number of histories of black women and politics across the country. Though black feminists have incisively delineated the government’s role in the marginalization of black women, a greater emphasis has been placed on sites of resistance outside of electoral politics. This has largely occluded analyses that thematize the ways in which black women have historically worked through the system. For these reasons, Black Women and Politics in New York City stands as an important and thought provoking contribution to the field. Gallagher heavily relies on archival research, mining a wealth of material on individual politicians and the institutions and organizations that these women participated in. From newspaper accounts to autobiographies, the highly educated and comparatively privileged women who populate Gallagher’s study have left a voluminous record of their lives and careers. For black feminist historians, this relative abundance of source material is unusual. Indeed, creativity and conjecture are often necessary ingredients alongside traditional sources for historians of minoritized groups. In contrast, the only leap of interpretation that Gallagher makes in Black Women and Politics in New York City is when she questions voter motivation, asking for example “how much did gender matter when both candidates were African American?” (82). Instead, Gallagher primarily reads along the grain of the historical record, providing a thorough overview of relevant elections from Grace Campbell’s pioneering campaign for an assembly seat in 1917 to Shirley Chisholm’s pathbreaking presidential run in 1972. Gallagher makes a number of key decisions in her writing of this history. First, although she describes her project as “a collective biography,” the text elides personal biographical details outside of the births, educations, and sometimes marriages of the women in the study (4). On one level, this is the inevitable result of her attempt to fit more than a dozen political careers into two hundred pages. Implicitly, though, it also responds to the emphasis on the domestic lives of female politicians in the public discourse. In 1944, the black newspaper People’s Voice, for example, assured its readers that “despite her varied activities, Mrs. [Ada B.] Jackson still runs a...

Professional Women's Well-Being: The Role of Discrimination and Occupational Characteristics

This study examined the association between perceived discrimination, workplace racial composition, and three outcomes—psychological distress, life dissatisfaction, and job dissatisfaction—among a sample of Black (n = 72) and White (n = 74) professional women. As a comparison, these relationships were analyzed to determine if they varied from those observed in more traditionally studied populations: Whites and non-professional Blacks, using data from a population of working women in the 1995 Detroit Area Study (N = 533). Perceived discrimination was associated with differences in psychological distress and job dissatisfaction but not with life dissatisfaction. The correlation between perceived discrimination and psychological distress was larger for White professional women than for Black professional women (White women odds ratio [OR]: 1.99; Black women OR: 0.80). A larger correlation between race and job dissatisfaction was observed for Black professional women than for Black non-professional women. The racial composition of the workplace was unrelated to any of the outcomes. Study results emphasized the importance of decreasing the frequency of discrimination for positive mental health and underscored the need for more systematic research on discrimination and health among Black women of higher socioeconomic status, a growing sub-population in the United States.

Black Women in the "Black Metropolis" of the Early Twentieth Century: The Case of Professional Occupations

Little research has examined the employment of Black women as teachers, nurses, and librarians in the urban Black communities of the early twentieth century. The present study fills this void, analyzing Census data on the largest urban Black communities at the start of the Great Migration to cities. The results show that, in spite of the supposed advantages of the northern “Black Metropolis,” Black communities in the urban North were relatively limited in their potential to offer opportunities for Black women to enter pursuits that were, at the time, mainstays of a nascent class of Black professional women.

The Emergence of Black Women Artists: The Founding of “Where We At”

Although the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s signaled one of the most significant developments in recent American art history, black women artists, for the most part, were underrepresented in major gallery and museum exhibitions at the movement’s inception. “Where We At” Black Women Artists: 1971, the first show of professional black women artists, was launched at the Acts of Art Gallery. The fourteen participants went on to form an artists’ collective of the same name. The group eventually became a real sisterhood, working together on common aesthetic ideals and developing a professional closeness. This essay, by one of the founding members, discusses the group’s origin and evolution, including its many successes, in the late twentieth century and beyond.

Socio-cultural barriers to physical activity among black isiXhosa speaking professional women in the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality

Chronic diseases of lifestyle in South Africa are on the increase, as shown by recent studies. Black women, who have the country’s highest levels of inactivity, overweight and obesity, are particularly at risk. This study used qualitative methods to investigate barriers to physical activity participation in two generations of Black professional women (teachers, nurses, social workers and public managers). The two generations reflect pre- and post-democracy age groups in South Africa. The older generation (n=20), aged 35 to 45 years, spent their formative years in apartheid South Africa, disadvantaged by racial policies. The younger generation (n=27), aged 18 to 21 years, spent their formative years in post-apartheid South Africa, post-1990, under a constitution which guarantees equality and non-discrimination. In-depth qualitative interviews, utilizing an interview guide, were used to collect data from the participants until data saturation was achieved. Data from the interviews were transcribed, analysed and verified in accordance with Cresswell (2003) and Guba’s model of trustworthiness (Krefting, 1991). Three sub-themes were identified relating to barriers to physical activity participation: personal, environmental and socio-cultural factors. The socio-cultural factors, the focus of this article, included the lack of social support, exercise “not being a part of African culture”, traditional gender roles, dress code, exercise associated with the young, exercise associated with undesirable weight loss and “destructive talk” by the community. The findings have highlighted misconceptions about exercise. Conservative socio-cultural barriers will have to be overcome before physical activity is seen as normative behaviour for Black women in a South African context.Key words: Physical activity; Socio-cultural barriers; Black women.

Black Love is Not a Fairytale

In 2009, the public witnessed an upsurge in media discussions about the lower marriage rates of professional black women. In the Unmarriageable Professional Black Woman discourse, the alleged pathological behavior of black men or black women causes marriage disparities, despite the fact that demographic data that can largely account for differences in marriage rates. This paper explores articulations of a heterosexual, and somewhat heteronormative, black female romantic imagination in the twenty-first century, and unpacks how the ideals and pathologies that subjects with various agendas attach to this imagination reveal the complex interplay of western romantic love narratives, black feminism, legacies of the Moynihan Report, and liberal individualism. Through discussions of three prominent examples representing the romantic desires of ambitious and successful black women in popular discourse, I explore how the heterosexual African American woman’s romantic imagination has been idealized and derided, with the idealization reflecting the ways in which feminism has done significant work in updating the romantic fantasy even as patriarchy’s presence is transparent, and the derision illustrating the disciplinary work of patriarchy and a broader national ideology that suggests that individuals are always responsible for not attaining their heart’s desires.

Keep Your ‘N’ in Check: African American Women and the Interactive Effects of Etiquette and Emotional Labor

Black professional women report that they must transform themselves to be welcomed and accepted, especially in the workplace. They speak of performance weariness in verbal and nonverbal communicative interaction-exchanges with white colleagues. Many simply state that they feel they are in a ‘parade’, being judged for appearance, personal decorum, communication skills, and emotion management in addition to productivity. The objective of this article is to describe these women’s experiences in line with promotion opportunities. For them, going to work involves a multilayered performance: (1) they must engage in racialized, gendered impression management at the generalized bureaucratic level; and (2) they rely on instructions grounded in race-based survival strategies to cope with challenges they face in unwelcoming work environments with concrete ceilings. Our analysis of these aspects of workplace behavior reveals that black women co-mingle etiquette and emotion management to gain acceptance and promotions, which strengthens race/ethnic group solidarity.

In the company of my sisters: Sister circles as an anxiety intervention for professional African American women

Background Sister circles have been used within African American communities to raise awareness about physical health. The possibility exists that sister circles could be used to educate and teach women strategies about managing anxiety and panic. In this paper we examine professional Black women's conceptualization of panic attacks and other related anxiety issues. Then, we explore the feasibility of sister circles as a psycho-educational anxiety intervention for African American professional women. Methods Four focus groups ( n = 37) were conducted. Focus group interviews were transcribed and were coded into three categories: (a) a major theme; (b) a minor theme; or (c) an off-topic comment. Specifically, we generate information regarding the key content and research components of a sister circle for African American female professionals. Results Focus group members saw a distinct difference between anxiety and panic. The number of African American women who experienced was seen as low. Women felt sister circles were a nice vehicle for helping African American women manage their anxiety and panic. Confidentially was a key component. Sister circles for anxiety and panic were seen as a natural outgrowth of African American women's professional networks. Limitations Limited data were collected on participant's anxiety levels. Conclusions Overall, sister circles were seen as feasible interventions for African American professional women. The data from the focus groups were used to enhance the development of a sister circle intervention for anxious professional African American women.

Black Professional Women at Risk of Anxiety Disorders

Black Professional Women at Risk of Anxiety Disorders

From Mammy to Superwoman

Black women, like other women of color, find themselves at the intersection of both racism and sexism in the workplace. Due to their unique dual status as racial and gender minorities, they encounter unique and unexplored barriers that inhibit their career as well as leadership development. The goal of this article is to highlight the emerging literature on how images of professional Black women align with their workplace experiences, and to highlight how these experiences may derail their ability to fully reach their potential. The authors also hope to motivate researchers and practitioners to investigate areas of practice that may better support these women's career development.

Coping with Work-Related Stress: A Study of the Use of Coping Resources Among Professional Black Women

ABSTRACT Professional Black women's experiences with work-related stress are rooted in the social, political, and economic context of the work environment. This environment is characterized by race and gender-based discrimination and social isolation in the workplace. The specific aims of this study were to describe professional Black women's coping responses to and the resources used to manage work-related stress. Data were collected from 203 professional Black women. Results indicate that spirituality was a key coping resource for coping with stress and specifically with work-related stress. Implications for social work intervention, policy, and research are addressed.