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

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 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...