Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work

Notes

163 Notes Introduction 1. Sociologists Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein found “remarkable dedication to the work ethic” among most of the welfare recipients they interviewed. They “recognized the stigma that their friends, communities, and the larger society imposed on welfare recipients, as well as the boost in self-esteem and social standing they gained from working.This is why they had tried to live off of work in the past and also why they were trying to find work in the future.” Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, “Work,Welfare, and Single Mothers’ Economic Survival Strategies,” American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 263. 2. I use census data on race, gender, and occupational position drawn from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS). Census data provides the most comprehensive set of quantitative information on long-term changes in the U.S. population. IPUMS integrates the census data samples across years to allow for uniformity in concepts and measures, permitting an analysis of historical change.The measure of occupation that I employ uses 1950 as the standard due to its similarity to the years both before and after, which provides comparability between occupational data across all years studied and greater confidence in the change observed. See Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder , and Matthew Sobek, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series:Version 5.0. Machine-readable database. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010), http://usa.ipums.org/usa/. 3. See Joya Misra, Stephanie Moller, and Marina Karides,“Envisioning Dependency : Changing Media Depictions of Welfare in the 20th Century,” Social Problems 50, no. 4 (2003): 482–504. 4. See Ivy Kennelly, “‘That Single-Mother Element’: How White Employers Typify Black Women,” Gender & Society 13 no. 2 (1999): 168–192. 5. See Phillip Moss and Chris Tilly, Stories Employers Tell: Race, Skill, and Hiring in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2003). Chapter 1. Hierarchies of Preference at Work 1. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (NewYork: New American Library, 1903), 19. 2. Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women,” in Let Nobody Turn Us Around:Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, An African American Anthology, ed. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 173. 3. Robert Blauner, Still the Big News: Racial Oppression in America (Philadelphia, Pa.:Temple University Press, 2001), 29. 4. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1988), 6. 5. R.W. Connell, Gender and Power (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987), 99. 6. Evelyn Nakano Glenn,“From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18 (1992): 2. 7. Ibid., 7. 8. Chinese men in the West provide an important exception to the designation of laundry work as women’s work exclusively. However, their performance of this work was a result of the shortage of women and their marginalized status within the labor market. Historian Joan S. Wang found that “due to their non-citizen status, the closed labor market, and the shortage of women, Chinese males substituted to some extent for female labor in the American West.” Joan S.Wang,“Race, Gender and Laundry Work:The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850–1950,” Journal of American Ethnic History 20 no. 1 (2004): 60. 9. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York:Vintage Books, 1986), 178. 10. Ibid., 261. 11. See ibid., 196–231, chapter on the Great Depression. 12. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill,“Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism,” Feminist Studies 22 (Summer 1996): 327. 13. Aida Hurtado,“Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color,” Signs 14 (1989): 854. 14. bell hooks,“Racism and Feminism,” in Theories of Race and Racism:A Reader, ed. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2000), 375. 15. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All of the Women Are White,All Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982). 16. Judith Lorber, Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and Politics (Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company, 2005), 196. 17. Irene Browne and Joya Misra,“The Intersection of Gender and Race in the Labor Market,” Annual Review of Sociology 29 (2003): 489. 18. Deborah King,“Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness:The Context of Black Feminist Ideology...