Black Working-class Women Research Articles

Optimism and resilience among the precariat: a gendered analysis of community home-based care work in South Africa

ABSTRACT Community Home-Based Care (CHBC) workers around the world have not been satisfied with their work over the years. In South Africa, unfair labor practices and poor organization of CHBC work have recently led to strikes and unionization by caregivers. At the frontline of caregiving are black working-class women whose dominance illuminates how the intersections of gender, class and race contribute to care workers’ precariat position. Regardless of the gendered precarious encounters, the 20 female CHBC workers from Soweto, South Africa, who participated in this study, are optimistic and resilient. This article visibilizes the optimism, resilience, positivity, self-empowerment, control, the gendered power, and agency that care workers exercise in response to the challenges that characterize care work. Beyond merely illuminating the gendered oppositional binaries, the article calls for the deconstruction of gendered hierarchies in care work to disrupt the exclusive participation of women in the global labor markets as care workers.

Imagining the Black Cook in Victorian London

In this study I return to an announcement of a new club that appeared in The Times in 1902. It remained in my mind over many years because of the description of a black cook who was expected to take a post in the Columbia Club’s kitchen. Though brief, this reference to a black Southern woman working in a London kitchen raised several questions, many of which I was unable to answer. Focusing on this announcement, I return to this nameless domestic worker within a strand of my current book project that explores how people lived together in the multi-ethnic cities and towns in the Victorian fin de siècle. Using reports and advertisements in newspapers, I explore the labour undertaken by black working-class men and women within the hierarchies of domestic labour, specifically the spaces of London’s kitchens, and how we can reconstruct or imagine the experiences of those who (may have) cooked in them.

Tracing the Intimate Histories of Poor Black Women in the Late-Nineteenth-Century US South

This article explores the dynamics of separation among Black veterans and their spouses in the post-emancipation South through an analysis of pension records. Few archival sources provide descriptions of Black working-class women and their relationships with their estranged husbands. Pension files offer a glimpse into the intimate lives of the Black poor and the legal communities they participated in as they navigated the US Pension bureaucracy. This essay tells the story of a North Carolina freedwoman, Jamsey Green, and my effort to trace the intimate histories of poor Black women using a combination of digital research tools, military records, and manuscript sources.

The Black Living Room

While the Black home is frequently imagined as either a target of state violence or a space from which to flee, a broader Black queer feminist intellectual and cultural archive of Black dwelling spaces reveals the Black home as a paradigmatic site of resistance to state-sanctioned infringements on Black erotic life. This is to say, the Black home is a crucial site of both violence and resistance for Black women living within the heart of US empire. This essay maps a Black feminist intellectual and erotic history of one specific site within the Black home—the "Black living room"—engaging the erotic function of vernacular street art that adorns the living room walls of contemporary, working-class Black women. In the process, the essay contends that the "Black living room" constitutes a discursive and material space within which Black women use material culture and interior design to mount visual campaigns against anti-Black violence and to assert the value of Black erotic being and becoming. The Black home, though mired in anti-Black violence, remains rife with liberatory, insurgent, and erotic potential.

Sylvia Wynter, Maskarade, and Performing the State

First produced as a teleplay for the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation in 1973, Sylvia Wynter’s Maskarade stands at the juncture of art-making and statecraft. The play centers on the Jamaican performance tradition of Jonkonnu, an African-descended carnival practice. Wynter’s state-commissioned plays funded by the now defunct JBC were part of a larger trend in the Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century, a time when governments in the region sponsored theatrical works in order to teach newly minted citizens how to relate to emerging states. These works also reconfigured and centralized the role of Black working-class and poor women in the new national imaginary through characters like Maskarade’s Miss Gatha. Using archival recovery and critical fabulation, I analyze the origins of the 1973 teleplay and subsequent 1983 published script in order to demonstrate the connection between twentieth-century Caribbean statecraft, media, and post-colonial theory (namely Wynter’s theorizations of “Indigenization”).

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

Introduction: In memoriam: bell hooks, 1952–2021

Introduction: In memoriam: bell hooks, 1952–2021

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

“They Had the Brains but They Didn’t Have the Expertise”: Black Working-Class Women and the Nurse Training Program at the Taborian Hospital, 1940s–1960s

This article rescues from invisibility Black working-class women nurses who staffed the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. In 1941, the Taborian Hospital introduced one of the state’s first nurse training programs that offered Black women economic opportunities beyond the fields of the Mississippi Delta. The article asserts that while many struggled to meet state requirements that promised higher wages and social mobility, Black women nurses introduced a health politic that defined health care activism before the 1960s. In so doing, they demonstrated that civil rights included the right to access to medical and nonmedical care that was dignified, quality, modern, and uplifting. This article expands the historical canon by placing working-class Black women nurses, who were essentially shut out of the professionalization movement because they did not redirect scant family resources to enroll in traditional nursing programs, alongside middle-class Black nurses and Black midwives.

The (Ho)rror of It All

The (Ho)rror of It All

Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment

Aesthetics of Excess:The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment Carolyn Silva (bio) Jillian Hernandez's Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020 In the book Aesthetics of Excess, University of Florida professor Jillian Hernandez explores the racialized and gendered experiences of working-class Black and Latina women and girls as their bodies and aesthetics are assessed, represented, and marginalized by societal norms of cultural production. The book attempts to capture the duality between legitimized versus deviant forms of gendered Blackness and Latinidad manifested through the bodies and aesthetics of girls and women of color. Hernandez's book is also a cautionary tale against discourses of excess that racialize the gendered aesthetics of Black women and Latinas by using white Eurocentric values, discourses, and imagery as the norm and producing a false dichotomy between excess and modesty as proxies for savagery and intellectual superiority, respectively. Born out of community work, the book draws on Hernandez's work with the Miami group Women on the Rise! (WORT), a space where art and theory collide, converse, and are shaped by the lived experiences and perceptions of girls and women of color. Situated in Miami, a city historically entangled with the aesthetics of Blackness and Latinidad, the book also captures Hernandez's complicated relationship with her own identity. Indeed, the book is inspired by Hernandez's own experiences as a woman of color, and the contrast between her own understanding of her aesthetics as a working-class Latina and the overtly sexualized gaze society attributes to Black and Latina women's visual identity. In exposing her conflicted relationship with her own identity, Hernandez walks us through the aesthetics, discourses, and representations of excess often associated with working-class Latinas and personified by the label of chonga. In Hernandez's tale, the representation of the chonga in popular culture allows us to understand [End Page 423] the politics of class and gendered aesthetics that racialize girls and women of color through the sexual aesthetics of excess. As Hernandez explains, the aesthetics of excess refers to the "creative, diasporic, iconographies and practices of bodily styling, art-making, and cultural production" (10) enacted by Black and Latina girls and women. Transgressive in nature, the aesthetics of excess capture women of color's attempts to engage in bodily representation to challenge hegemonic perceptions of gender, race, and sexual normativity that insist on perceiving excess "as a negative, a social liability, or deviancy" (11). Conversely, Hernandez chooses to read excess as a tool of empowerment and a form of cultural production utilized by women and girls of color to complicate notions of cultural and hierarchical perceptions of cultural productions that ultimately illustrate the "interplay between the sexual, racial, class, and gender discourses circulating in media" (9). Indeed, as Hernandez notes, women of color across the African diaspora have utilized and strategically positioned their bodies as canvases of representation that speak to issues of "race, gender, class, and sexuality for Black and Latina women and girls as they make art with and about their bodies" (7). Yet, as Hernandez notes, the cultural recognition of deviant modes of Latinidad embodied by the exaggerated aesthetics of girls and women of color came accompanied by a societal assessment that further racialized and marginalized Black and Latina bodies within and outside academic spaces, a trend exemplified by the polarized reactions to Cardi B, an AfroLatina, and her sexually charged music video "WAP," featuring Megan Thee Stallion. Policed by academia and society alike, the excess often carries the historical marks of "diasporic creative, cultural, and spiritual lineages that predate European colonization" (11) while troubling ideas of race formation, gender, and sexuality that continue to oppress women of color. Viewed in this light, excess becomes a creative practice embodied and enacted by women of color that "trouble sexual policing and reveal class disparity" (17). After all, as Hernandez suggests, by showing up as themselves in dehumanizing spaces, women of color have utilized excess as an agentic tool to subvert racialized sociocultural boundaries, legitimate their personhood, and agitated normative discourses. [End Page 424] Carolyn Silva Carolyn Silva is a PhD candidate in the...

Mapping Working-Class Activism in Reconstruction St. Louis

Blending the tools of micro-history with historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) permits us to chart the social networks and everyday journeys of black working-class women activists and the middle-class men with whom they came into contact in Reconstruction St. Louis. Social and spatial ties shaped the activism of St. Louis’ working-class women; mapping these ties reveals the links between everyday acts of resistance and organized efforts of African Americans to carve out a space for themselves in the restructuring city and make visible a collective activism that crossed class and racial boundaries.

Feminist Pedagogy and the South African Curriculum: The case of Women and Food Security

There is a food security crisis in South Africa and black working-class women are the shock absorbers of this crisis. It follows that where food studies are included in the South African curriculum, the relationship between women and food security should be understood and critiqued by learners. Improvements in gender equality have also been identified as one of the primary drivers of improvements in food security. In this paper, the South African curriculum is analysed in terms of food studies, gender studies and the promotion of gender equality. Using the lens of feminist pedagogy, a set of qualitative indicators were developed to assess the content and praxis of the curriculum. While there is content which deals with gender and with food, these are presented separately. In the Geography and Agriculture curricula, there is a marked lack of focus on gender concerns. This article concludes that the curriculum could be reoriented to include an awareness and critique of the nexus of women and food and that more positive representations of women as active and powerful agents are needed in the South African Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS).

Feminist Pedagogy and the South African Curriculum: The case of Women and Food Security

There is a food security crisis in South Africa and black working-class women are the shock absorbers of this crisis. It follows that where food studies are included in the South African curriculum, the relationship between women and food security should be understood and critiqued by learners. Improvements in gender equality have also been identified as one of the primary drivers of improvements in food security. In this paper, the South African curriculum is analysed in terms of food studies, gender studies and the promotion of gender equality. Using the lens of feminist pedagogy, a set of qualitative indicators were developed to assess the content and praxis of the curriculum. While there is content which deals with gender and with food, these are presented separately. In the Geography and Agriculture curricula, there is a marked lack of focus on gender concerns. This article concludes that the curriculum could be reoriented to include an awareness and critique of the nexus of women and food and that more positive representations of women as active and powerful agents are needed in the South African Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS).

Networks of Resistance: Floria Pinkney and Labor Interracialism in Interwar America

The life of Black labor activist Floria Pinkney exemplifies the powerful connections between labor unions, workers’ education, and the YWCA that set the stage for the long Civil Rights Movement. In the 1920s Pinkney attended three workers’ education colleges: Brookwood Labor College, the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, and the International People’s College in Denmark. Pinkney also became a prominent labor organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) and worked in the New Deal’s Workers’ Education Project. The 1930s alliance between labor and civil rights generally marks the starting decade of the long Civil Rights Movement. But this alliance was fostered by an earlier left culture of social unionism and workers’ education. Pinkney’s journey through this world illustrates Black women’s propagation of this culture. Her life exposes how the expansive networks of labor and civil rights organizations empowered working-class Black women in the interwar period.

“Forced to Care” at the Neoliberal University: Invisible Labour as Academic Labour Performed by Black Women Academics in the South African University

ABSTRACTHigher education in South Africa faces the challenge and complexities of expanding to include a Black (Indian, Coloured and African) majority that was previously denied access. At the same time, global capitalism is entrenching neoliberal cultures, forcing institutions of higher education to restructure their academic labour processes into a quantifiable “assembly line”, producing more outputs with fewer resources. In addition to typical research responsibilities that form part of standard academic labour, most administrative tasks have also been delegated to teaching faculty members. Exploring the biographical experiences of the authors, this paper argues that neoliberalism and corporatization of the university results in the performance of “invisible labour” (Wichroski, M.A. 1994. “The secretary: invisible labour in the work world of women”. Human Organisation, 53(1): 33–41) by black women academics. This form of labour is unrewarded. Beyond the invisible expectations of being “role models” to students and peers, Black African women academics feel morally pressured to engage in “care work”, a role that is stereotypically associated with their social and cultural backgrounds. Similar to domestic roles historically associated with working-class Black African women in South Africa, this form of invisible labour is not recognized and is thus unpaid. It is not captured by the university performance metric systems, and therefore has no significant value for academic promotion or prestigious university awards. This has consequences for the occupational structure of South African universities, contributing to the perpetual relegation of Black African women to the bottom of the institutional hierarchy. Similar to the apartheid era, Black African women are thus excluded from structures of power and influence, remaining the academic housekeepers—forced to care generously with few resources or reward.

“For Women, Life Is Right Hard”: When Frazier’s Subjects Speak for Themselves

Abstract While Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s sociological materials have been criticized for contributing to the pathologization of black working-class womanhood, Frazier’s interviews also offer a rich archive from which to cull the complexities of inner life that transcend the instrumental renderings of black pathology and the narrow configurations of black women’s urban migration experiences. Specifically, this archive accentuates interiority and brings into relief conceptions of self as articulated by black poor and working-class women themselves. The African American mothers interviewed for E. Franklin Frazier’s Washington, DC, interwar project on black adolescent personality development took advantage of interviewers’ listening ears, sometimes ignoring specific questions to instead share personal stories and unsolicited political ideologies and analytical frameworks. What comes through are narratives of lived experiences, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that highlight deliberations on sex and sexuality, the institution of marriage, childbearing and childrearing, New Negro conceptualizations of gender, domesticity, and ways in which black women asserted authorial control over their bodies. These articulations suggest (and sometimes exclaim) a desire to speak, a desire for an audience, a desire to be heard and recognized, and demonstrate that black poor and working-class women had a complex, ambivalent relationship to the concepts of both double consciousness and dissemblance.

From “at Risk” to Interdependent: The Erotic Life Worlds of HIV+ Jamaican Women

In post-colonial Jamaica, the iconic portrayal of “sun, sex, and smiles” clashes with the disproportionate rates of HIV among working-class black Jamaican women. Even though the Caribbean has both the highest incidence rates of reported AIDS cases and HIV prevalence rates in the Americas, second only to Africa, the region remains largely ignored in scholarship on the HIV/AIDS pandemic and black political movement. This essay draws from feminist ethnographic research on the grassroots organizing of HIV-positive Jamaican women in Kingston, Jamaica. In this essay, I delineate how women in an HIV/AIDS activist organization, EVE for Life, develop and cultivate HIV/AIDS care strategies through women-centered networks. I read these networks as intentional communities of interdependence and psychosocial care, rather than simply invisible “at-risk” groups or passive victims subjected to “a paralyzing plague.” I contend that the homosocial intimacies that characterize these networks of care reflect an “intraventive” cultural practice and knowledge, a term that Marlon Bailey uses to describe the organic ways community members represent themselves individually and collectively. Furthermore, they reveal how the embodied knowledges of HIV-positive Black women challenge pathologizing public health and academic discourses, while also serving as conduits for enhancing and extending theories about bodies, sexuality, power, and intimacy. By offering a culturally-specific exploration of the socio-erotic lives of working-class HIV-positive Black Jamaican women, this paper concludes with a discussion about how centering our analysis on the Caribbean and Black women expands the geographic and thematic scopes of studies of race, racism, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS.

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 World on Fire

This essay considers the film Born in Flames in the context of the radical black feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, with an eye to the current invigoration of black feminist political action. It focuses on the way the film envisions the formation of a counterpublic and commons by and for working-class black women and women of color through music, sonic connection, and the hijacking of media communication. The film’s political commitment in both its production and content is anarchistic; it questions authority, refuses hierarchical structures, and calls for us to destabilize all dominant and dominating paradigms. The essay argues that the film demands a renewed radical feminism, one not based in appeals for inclusion or protection under the social contract but based in noncompliance, the demand for collectivity and continued revolutionary practice.