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This chapter describes landmark legal arguments Murray made about equal protection in the 1960s. Using the category of “Jane Crow,” she demanded that the law be responsive to the synthetic nature of identity. In so doing, Murray placed African American women's experiences at the center of democratic consideration. Despite her attempts to build coalitions, she found herself increasingly at odds with leaders of the feminist and Black Freedom movements.

This chapter describes the ways in which self-silencing theory can be used to understand the experiences of women in inner-city Boston living with HIV/AIDS. The author discusses how the self-silencing construct contributed to the creation of a gender-sensitive culturally relevant intervention related to safe sex behaviors for women at risk. The chapter presents a program of community-based participatory action research that involves (a) an examination of the complex problem of women living with HIV/AIDS in the United States, and (b) the use of the author's culturally relevant intervention to change behavior, increase self-esteem, decrease depression, and give ”voice” to women. The author argues that self-silencing theory can be applied in creating an innovative approach to HIV/AIDS prevention for women.

This chapter focuses on the 1920 essay “The Damnation of Women,” Du Bois's collective biography of African American women. Despite the masculinism that defines much of his writing, and the tensions that qualify even his strongest arguments on behalf of gender equality, this essay demands that readers grapple with the meaning of “womanhood” and “citizenship” through the lens of black women's history. It also reorients feminist citizenship theory in the United States by demonstrating the need to go beyond reckoning with race to confront the lingering shadows of slavery.

This chapter presents the history of early African American beauty contests, which were black institutional responses to racist depictions of black women. They constitute evidence that African Americans did not accept the dominant racial order as natural. With few exceptions, the contests were produced by black institutions exclusively for black audiences. Separate by design, these contests can be considered nationalist, though they should not be automatically grouped analytically with later expressions of black separatism. The early black beauty contests were produced in an era of white racist segregation. In that context, black social institutions did not, in and of themselves, present a direct or immediate challenge to whites. Beauty pageants were generally sponsored by members of the black middle class and reflected the biases characteristic of the class. Black newspapers and social clubs established separate black beauty pageants as nonconfrontational ways of expressing racial pride, but they often reinforced hierarchies of gender, class, and color in their challenges to white supremacy.

“Licentiousness in All its Forms” recovers African American women’s significant intervention into sexual discourse between 1835 and 1845, a period here designated the interracial moment in moral reform. In an era of amalgamation riots, some black abolitionists forged a delicate coalition with white evangelicals. Female moral reformers condemned “licentiousness in all its forms,” and black abolitionists applied this language to “the licentiousness of slavery.” In turn, African American women built upon the physiological contention that all bodies were equally prone to virtue or vice. By distinguishing universal sexual virtue from white female purity, they undercut stereotypes of black licentiousness. Activists such as Sarah Mapps Douglass, Nancy Prince, Lavinia Hilton and Hetty Burr inspired Sarah and Angelina Grimké’s famous analysis of women’s moral equality with men. In this activist context, it became both possible and necessary for a few white women to question assumptions of their inherent purity. In the process, they applied the language of solitary vice to their own lives. African American women strategically appropriated antimasturbation physiology even as they remained focused on structural oppression. Although they only temporarily destabilized racialized discourses on female sexuality, their moral reform efforts had significant consequences for American sexual thought.

Having won the ballot, the former suffragists organized the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, through which women could continue to work as a pressure group for a female reform agenda. Minnie Fisher Cunningham helped found both the Texas and the national LWVs; from 1921-23 she served in Washington, D.C. as the national organization's first executive secretary, working closely with President Maud Wood Park. She helped the LWV, as part of the Women's Joint Congressional Committee, lobby through Congress two signature achievements: the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act (1921) and the Cable Act (1922). Cunningham oversaw the planning for the LWV's Pan American Congress of Women in 1922, and she quietly and persistently worked to keep the LWV's Negro Problems Committee from dying of neglect. After becoming chair of the committee in 1924, she advocated that the LWV encourage and assist African-American women to vote.

This chapter covers Murray's career and writings as a young lawyer in the late 1940s through the 1950s. It explores her development of a new kind of American history and an account of black American identity as integral to her democratic thought. In response to McCarthyist insinuations that she is disloyal, she published a family memoir that portrayed her multiracial family and the history of violence against which it was formed. In the late 1950s, Murray left the United States for Ghana in search for a sense of home, but ultimately concluded that her racial identity and history made her irrevocably American.

This chapter explores conversations involving black and white women across multiple settings (for example, cosmetology schools, hair educational seminars, Internet discussions) that further elucidate what is at stake for African American women in discussions about hair. African American women's hair narratives and knowledge about hair were, in many ways, filtered through their experiences of marginalization as a collective of women whose ethnic features were long considered unattractive. Black women's ideas about hair are intricately connected to cultural identity, gendered experiences, and racial consciousness. In three separate hair discussions, white women unwittingly ran into trouble despite their attempts to align with black women. This chapter examines the nature of their linguistic missteps and black women's (mis)readings to illuminate what went wrong and what contributed to these women's conversational alignments and misalignments.

This chapter examines how working-class African American women retained their deep faith in education as a tool of upward mobility in the face of the racist policies adopted by the Philadelphia public school system. Of all the institutions that women approached, the public education system was the most discriminatory and unresponsive, and it played a powerful role in shaping African Americans' future prospects. While civil rights activists sought to eliminate the racial segregation within the school system, most working-class mothers focused their attention on performing the daily labor required to facilitate their children's education. Mothers tried to maintain some limited contact with the schools, even after encountering teachers and principals who viewed them with contempt and blamed them for their children's problems. Some women looked outside of the school system to secure resources that they needed to educate their children. They tried to convince the municipal government to help them address problems in their neighborhoods that impeded their children's successful pursuit of education.

This book provides an ethnographic and multi-sited account of how African American women use language to negotiate the significance of hair in their everyday lives. From the perspective of linguistic anthropology, the book examines how African American women use both hair itself and language about hair as cultural resources to shape the way they see themselves and are seen by others. By exploring how women make sense of hair in the everyday and across the many places where the subject of hair is routinely taken up (for example, beauty salons, hair educational seminars, stylists' Bible study meetings, hair fashion shows, comedy clubs, Internet discussions, and cosmetology schools), the book presents situated and lived accounts of the role of hair and language in the formation of a black woman's identity. The book looks at hair care, how it takes on situated social meanings among black women, and how language both mediates and produces these social meanings.

This chapter argues that the role of the National Association of Colored Women in early law-related civil rights activism should be reconceptualized to emphasize the importance of African American club women's work in pushing the boundaries of the public/private divide. These activists built private social welfare institutions to serve African Americans' communities excluded from the benefits of the emerging social welfare state—as a first step that utilized the avenues for agency presented by the political conditions of the times—and then often followed up these efforts with requests that the public institutions of the state take over or fund institutions built through private, voluntarist efforts.

“Jesus is my doctor”, a claim made by many black women, raises a rich mélange of culturally resonant issues. Faith is articulated as an active, powerful, protective, creative partnership with a God who loves completely and without reservation. Lived in the body, community, and world, African American women's faith often extends to hope for the healing of all people as a natural corollary of envisioning a new, more perfect world. Faith in “Doctor” Jesus is neither superstitious nor contradictory when grounded in such social and ideological understandings. This chapter explores black women's beliefs in faith healing. It is based on interviews of black women, mostly in the Detroit area, conducted between 1996 and 2003 about their understandings of faith, health, healing, and spirituality. First, it considers some of the basic issues when gender and health cross in black women's lives. Then, it looks at the crossings of medicine with the lives of African American women. Finally, it examines accounts from members of the grassroots Detroit Metropolitan Black Women's Health Project.

This chapter discusses how the African American women's beauty culture reached new heights of commercialization and economic prominence in urban black communities. This occurred about twenty years after the Second World War, and showed that black hairdressers were clearly proud of their achievements and role in the community. Along with black beauty experts and writers for mass market black magazines, they even insisted that American beauty standards be desegregated. The discussion also reflects both the successes and limitations of black people's struggles for political, economic, and social justice during these years.

This chapter examines the influence of gender and economic development on women's work and family life, and the ways in which these two areas interact. Anchoring gender in women's work, this chapter directs attention beyond a set of domestic tasks themselves to how such work was organized and supported, and how such support may have changed over time. It demonstrates how the central issue for women was thus how to defend space for these domestic tasks against new claims on their time, and the severe costs when such efforts failed. While white women largely succeeded in such efforts, it notes that the experience of African American women shows in cruel form, an alternative relationship between home and market. It clarifies that the gender division of labor was sustained in various ways through the first half of the twentieth century, though in a form imposing great burdens on African American women.

Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands—more commonly known as the Freedmen's Bureau—in March 1865. Upon its creation, the short-lived and unprecedented federal agency assumed the Herculean task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the immediate post-emancipation South. It became the embodiment of the triumphant North in a defeated South, and its agents the very face of federal authority. This bureau profoundly affected the lives of African-American women in the age of emancipation. Aside from applying the northern economic theory of free labor in a southern context, the bureau also worked to institute a social reconstruction based on northern middle-class notions of domesticity, dependency, and family relations. Whatever the intentions and actions of bureau officials stationed across the South, freedwomen—much like freedmen—encountered, trusted, and challenged the bureau and used it to their own ends. The bureau accomplished a great deal before being officially dismantled in 1872.

This introductory begins by discussing African American women's interactions with public institutions, which played a key role in the so-called “origins of the urban crisis”: the growing concentration of poverty among African Americans in postwar cities. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the gendered construction of racialized poverty in postwar Philadelphia by examining the experiences, perspectives, and actions of African American women who sought assistance from the city's public institutions. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This book takes up one crucial aspect of the “woman question” debate: the extent to which African American women would exercise autonomy and authority within their community's public culture. Black activist thought on the question changed over the course of the century. In some cases convergences fostered the enhancement of women's public standing; at other times disagreements thwarted women's claims and threatened the well-being of the institutions of which they were a part. Always, the woman question generated challenges over power. The parameters of the debate cut across institutional boundaries. Biblical precepts were employed to support the seating of women in political conventions, and political theory was used to argue against the elevation of women to the ministry. Finally, the debate emerged across a broad geographic terrain.

This chapter focuses on African American women's resistance to sexual violence during the transition from slavery to freedom and how their campaigns against rape influenced national debates about the emerging meanings of freedom and black citizenship. During Reconstruction, the Republican governments lost political power in the South, paving the way for night riders and Klansmen to rape and sexually brutalize black women for political gain. In response, black women renewed their efforts to redefine citizenship to include all women and their right to determine when and with whom they had sexual relations. Citing the sexual vulnerability of slave women and their efforts to defend themselves, this chapter examines how black women and their allies shaped the Republican Party's vision of racial equality from the 1850s until the end of Reconstruction. It shows how black women's radical campaigns for sexual justice and Republican ideas about legal equality combined to make visible the emergence of a new sexual citizenship that culminated during the Civil War.

Chapter 5 discusses a group of musicals produced around 2000 that foreground race / ethnicity as well as gender: Parade, Caroline, or Change, The Color Purple, and In the Heights. By studying key conventional moments in each musical—the female protagonist’s first and last numbers—this chapter maps out the interdependence of race, gender, and sexuality in contemporary Broadway musicals. By the 1990s and the millennium, with “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” and Third Wave feminism in the air, the slightly-behind-the-times Broadway musical stage made a concerted effort to represent people of color. A number of musicals opened in a variety of forms and formats and told stories that centrally featured women of color. These musicals used the tools that had been around since the 1950s—the opening declarative solo number and powerful 11 o’clock number—and affirmed African American, Latina, and Jewish women as self-determining, self-assertive individuals and Broadway’s stars.