In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Social Forces 82.3 (2004) 1218-1220



[Access article in PDF]
Too Much to Ask: Black Women in the Era of Integration. By Elizabeth Higginbotham. University of North Carolina Press, 2001. 288 pp. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $19.95.

Although the African American women about whom Elizabeth Higginbotham writes in Too Much to Ask are not even a full generation older than I, their presence — on predominantly white college campuses in particular and in the work world in general — allowed me a better experience in college and made the experience of work far less trying than it would have been without their sacrifices. That said, there are structural reasons in addition to timing for the interrelatedness of our experiences. One of the most salient is class.

Using in-depth interviews and surveys, Higginbotham contacted 56 women who described school experiences at the same time as the U.S. was pushed through the tunnel of resistance to integration by the civil rights movement into an atmosphere of ambivalent desegregation. Leaving high school and entering college in the 1960s, her respondents "were an optimistic group ready to accept the challenges of integration. Their struggles were critical ones, and we can point to individual successes. However, we have not seen the institutional change that many of the women thought their actions would bring about."

Thus, Higginbotham sets the stage for a sociological essay that outlines the often demanding and difficult choices the families of these particular women made to pursue a solid education for their daughters. She does so against a meticulously researched and often elegantly written history of the state of black American families and their work and residential options during the 1950s and [End Page 1218] 1960s. At the same time, she introduces her reader to the complex interplay of race, class, and family composition for the implications of her respondents' trajectories. True to the postmodern moment, Higginbotham refuses to let the racial identity of her subjects be reduced to an archetypal experience where they can be nostalgically remembered as sacrificing heroines and then forgotten. By asking black women who were both working-class (55 percent) and middle- class (45 percent), who went to public and private high schools that were both diverse and homogeneous, she followed their routes to colleges that were both selective and nonselective, public and private. While some of her respondents had not yet completed college at the time of her study and others had earned advanced degrees several years earlier, their experiences reveal a level of family strategizing, solidarity, and goal orientation that will probably seem quite different from the families of most middle-class white women who went to college during the same era.

Despite the brevity of space for this review, two of Elizabeth Higginbotham's findings deserve repeating. One is that the parents' financial well-being put middle-class students on different footings in high school, oriented them toward different kinds of colleges, and differently prepared Higginbotham's respondents for navigating the experiences of college — from academic confidence to dating to negotiating sometimes hostile racial atmospheres. While the parents of the women that Higginbotham interviewed all wanted their daughters to achieve their full potential, their job statuses and incomes positioned them differently when it came to knowledge, resources, and even confidence in supporting their daughters' educational pursuits. The struggles of Higginbotham's respondents are similar to those of contemporary students who are working-class, African American, and female. Indeed, while black girls are likely to have different experiences from black boys in school (see Ann Arnett Ferguson's Black Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, University of Michigan Press, 2000), working-class black girls especially are regularly schooled to enter jobs that replicate those of nineteenth-century domestics — nurse's aides, food-service workers, janitors, and child-care providers.

A second finding that bears mentioning is that the plans that Higginbotham's respondents had for their lives were not traditional, especially considering that they were exposed to the dominant-group ideals of women primarily as wives, homemakers, and child-care providers...

pdf

Share