African American Women’s Sexuality

I would like to thank Joanne Meyerowitz for organizing and inviting me to participate in this roundtable and for giving me the opportunity to reflect briefly on the importance of John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s seminal work, Intimate Matters. Few works have influenced the development of a field both in laying the groundwork for future scholarship and in shaping pedagogical practice as powerfully as Intimate Matters has done in the field of the history of sexuality in the United States. It is hard to believe it has been twenty-five years since its initial publication—like many others I continue to use it in my history of sexuality courses and to turn to it as a touchstone in my ongoing efforts to grapple with the sweep of America’s sexual past and present and the place of black sexuality and, in particular, the sexual lives of African American women within that history.

I reached for this book early and often in my own work on black women’s sex work in turn-of-the-century Chicago. The interpretive framework John and Estelle offer in Intimate Matters provided a backdrop against which the crucial role of black women’s sexual labor and the interracial and intraracial politics surrounding it became visible for me. It helped me to understand the central connection between black migration and sexual modernization in the early twentieth century. And it provided a lens through which to see and further probe the historical criminalization of black sexuality and the role that the regulation of black bodies played in defining citizenship in early-twentieth-century cities.

The analytical frameworks that John and Estelle developed in Intimate Matters—the mapping of the transformation in the meaning of sexuality from its primary association with reproduction and the family to an association with individual sexual pleasure, the development of the concepts of civilized morality and sexual liberalism, and their steady focus on the ways that sexuality has simultaneously reflected and served to maintain systems of class, gender, and racial oppressions within the United States—have provided the scaffolding upon which, I think it is fair to say, the now well-established field of the history of sexuality in America has been constructed. And, as groundbreaking works do, Intimate Matters has inspired historians over the past twenty-five years to rethink, expand upon, and challenge its narrative framings. Perhaps most importantly, Intimate Matters has spurred successive cohorts of graduate students to dig deeper into the meaning of the nation’s sexual history, to dig deeper in the archives, and to take up as centerpieces of research and historical reflection the fragments, often the most deeply embedded fragments, of America’s sexual past.

Intimate Matters was the first comprehensive survey of American sexual history, and in creating an overarching narrative of the nation’s sexual past, John and Estelle did what no other historians of sexuality had done—they highlighted the central role that race has played in the multiple dramas that comprise the story of American sexuality.

For this panel I was asked to reflect on the history of black women’s sexuality and the state of that field of research, theorizing, and writing. To engage the topic of black women’s sexuality, I would like to discuss the challenges that researchers and writers face as they endeavor to study the fraught intersection of black women and sex in American culture and history. I will first discuss my own efforts to grapple with the nature of evidence and the politics of interpretation about black sexuality, and, second, I will put forth a set of questions that can help us to imagine the directions that the study of black women’s sexuality might take as we move the field forward.

My study of black women’s sex work in turn-of-the-century Chicago was spurred in part by a desire to make visible black prostitutes and their labors and to place them within the context of the major signposts in the study of African American sexuality. I also wanted to think about how incorporating the history of prostitution might...