Notes
Notes Introduction 1 James Curwood to Sarah Curwood, July 19, 1937. This letter and other papers of Sarah T. Curwood now reside at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcli∏e Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 2 Coontz, Marriage, 8. See also May, Great Expectations. 3 New Negroes have received comprehensive treatment in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, and later in Lewis’s W. E. B. Du Bois: Fight for Equality. See also Gates and Jarrett’s introduction to New Negro. Davarian Baldwin, in Chicago’s New Negroes, expands study of the New Negro into the urban Midwest. 4 Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents, 6–7. 5 Nell Irvin Painter uses this phrase to describe the study of southern history in Southern History across the Color Line, 2. 6 Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 3–4. 7 Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” 8 Patterson, Zora Neale Hurston, 93. 9 Stephanie Shaw has acknowledged the social-psychological concepts of “external” and “internal” factors in the lives of professional black women. She maintains that women simultaneously participated in both internal (family and community) groups and external groups over which they had no control. See Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do, 5. By the same token, then, married couples also both belonged to their own families and commu nities and experienced life as black Americans in the Jim Crow United States. Chapter 1 1 Throughout this period, African Americans and whites married at comparable rates. Herbert Gutman, in Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 455, notes that five in six black children in New York City in 1925 lived with both parents. 166 notes to pages 15–19 According to Andrew Cherlin, statistics show that marriage was a common experience for African Americans. From the late nineteenth century through much of the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans married earlier, and more frequently, than whites. Other measures show black- white di∏erences before World War II to be very small. For example, in the early twentieth century, the vast majority of urban black children lived with both parents. In addition to marrying earlier in life, before 1950, more African American couples married than white couples, measured by the percentage of women ages 20–24 who had never married (i.e., were neither married, divorced, widowed, nor separated). By 1950, young white women married in greater numbers than did young black women. See Cherlin, Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage, 94–95, 102–3. Stephanie Coontz argues that the subsequent statistical divergence between blacks and whites— most notably in out- of- wedlock births, lower rates of marriage, and higher rates of divorce— is likely connected with the postindustrial city and other post–World War II factors. See Coontz, Way We Never Were, 241–44. 2 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 11. 3 Ibid., 12. 4 On women’s stereotypes and nineteenth- century public actions, see Cott, Public Vows; Welter, Dimity Convictions; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 231–35, 242–43; and Coontz, Way We Never Were, 107–8. 5 Coontz, Marriage, 145–49, 164 (quote on 177). 6 Ibid., 179, 181. 7 Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 2, 4; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 109–15. 8 Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow, 146–47. 9 Stansell, American Moderns, 31–32. 10 Multiple studies have examined African American family life within slavery, and I will leave that discussion to them. See Gutman, Black Family in Slavery and Freedom; King, Stolen Childhood; Stevenson, Life in Black and White; Frankel, Freedom’s Women; and Painter, Southern History across the Color Line. Frances Smith Foster has compiled writings by African Americans that show how African Americans themselves saw their own families. She argues for the existence of a rich tradition of writing about love and marriage before the twentieth century. See Foster, Love and Marriage in Early African America, xiii–xvi. 11 Cott, Public Vows, 81, 86–96. 12 For an accounting of such laws, see Grossberg, “Guarding the Altar,” 222. 13 For a discussion of the “Jezebel” and “Mammy” stereotypes of black women, see White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? 14 Cott, Public Vows, 106–7, 116, 141–42. 15 See White, Too Heavy a Load, 44–54, 69–72. 16 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 78. 17 Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl, 58–59; Washington, “New Negro Woman” (cited in ibid., 50). [18.117.148.105] Project...
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