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12. New Negro Marriages and the Everyday Challenges of Upward Mobility
- University of Minnesota Press
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291 New Negro Marriages and the Everyday Challenges of Upward Mobility ANASTASIA CURWOOD 12 We might be forgiven for thinking of New Negroes as merely race men and women, with no concerns save those that might advance the race. But New Negroes were also complex human beings, with identities as husbands, wives, and other family members. Just as it is important to expand the conversation on New Negroes geographically and beyond the arts and letters, scholars must reckon with the full subjectivity of black historical actors in the early twentieth century. Private life, through the lens of marriage, documents both New Negroes’ powerful visions of the marriages that they hoped would advance the race and their individual struggles to realize those marriages. One defining aspect of the New Negro moment was the contested meaning of gender roles within class identity. New Negroes felt the pull of the old politics of respectability, which had been one strategy to combat racism, mixed with the desire to remake a modern black middle class that dealt more frankly with both politics and sexuality. Although matters of taste and culture divided black elites, one thing on which many middle-class or aspiring middle-class New Negroes agreed was the need to distance themselves from the behaviors of poor and workingclass black people. Gender roles were a key differentiator of class status for New Negroes. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in tensions over spouses’ roles in marriage. Specifically, the ideal that men would make enough money to be family breadwinners while women would inspire and support New Negro manhood collided with the reality of New Negro women’s own career and activism ambitions. Furthermore, as the 1920s gave way to the Great Depression, uncertain employment, low wages, and women’s participation in paid labor chipped away at the ideal of a male breadwinner. However, many New Negroes clung to the male breadwinner ideal and predicated racial status on gender role hierarchy. That the New Negroes saw class and gender identities as central to the racial project has begun to be incorporated into scholarship of the era. However, the 292 ANASTASIA CURWOOD realities of living those identities, on the level of marriage relationships, are far less explored. In this essay, I examine the ideal of male breadwinning among New Negroes and then turn to the realities: I describe a marriage between two upwardly mobile spouses who confronted divergent visions of gender roles in marriage. My grandparents Sarah and James Curwood, who have left evidence of their marital discussions in hundreds of letters, were New Negroes because they participated in the aggressive racial self-definition—his as a cosmopolitan male breadwinner and hers as a professional, financially independent race woman— that characterize these historical actors.1 Like other New Negroes, the Curwoods were caught up in a movement toward self-determination through racial pride and upward mobility. But, simultaneously, they experienced painful negotiations over evolving gender roles. Their divergent expectations are particularly revealing in that they embody the competing tensions over husbands’ and wives’ roles in the early twentieth century. The story of their marriage shows the impact of cultural expectations within the most intimate of human relationships, an impact that they were certainly not alone in feeling. HUSBANDS, BREADWINNING, AND EVERYDAY COUPLES Gender role ideals for marriage conflicted with each other and were difficult to implement—and that left individual couples to work out the marital divisions of labor for themselves. Most tried to maintain a male breadwinning model, especially if they saw themselves as leaders within the race: Marie Brown Frazier herself had given up her career as a writer to be a proper faculty wife to the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, and Fisk president Charles S. Johnson’s wife spent much of her time worrying about and buttressing her husband’s reputation.2 However, especially after 1929, everyone also had to consider economic reality and the individual situations of each partner. Some husbands could not find or hold jobs that paid a family wage; some wives strongly desired a career or had skills that could bring in significant income. Thus conforming to the male breadwinner ideal was often difficult. Even for members of the middle class, financial concerns arose from the common expectation that husbands had to be the sole breadwinners. Marital problems often arose when men did not fulfill their economic role or when wives took on too much economic independence for their husbands’ liking. Then and now, finances and financial trouble were...