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  • Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work
  • Karen Flynn
Enobong Hannah Branch, Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press 2011)

A historical comparison of Black women’s labour force experience with white and Black men as well as with white women reveals that each group has held very different types of jobs. Using intersectional analysis in conjunction with census and other empirical data, Branch judiciously maps how race and gender coalesced over a 100-year period to restrict Black women to undesirable positions. Branch begins chronologically in 1860 and carries her analysis through 2008, focusing on Black women as farm labourers; as domestic, clerical and factory workers (which includes meatpacking and slaughtering); and as professional workers. The author begins from the premise that the work Black women performed during slavery subsequently laid the foundation for their exploitation post-emancipation. Confining Black women to devalued work was systematically supported by state and federal laws, individual employers, employees, and local communities who mounted resistance when Black women attempted to enter into more desirable occupations that were defined as “white” jobs. (61) Branch aptly illustrates that when race and gender are taken into account and linked to privileges and disadvantages in the world of work, the story of US labour radically changes. It becomes less about self-determination and meritocracy and more about how opportunities are given to some and withheld from others. As Branch’s evidence clearly reveals, “The history of the U.S. labor market is fundamentally the story of who people were rather than what they did.” (21)

The labour market then is far from a neutral site in that it privileges and confers benefits and disadvantages based on race and gender. While at different historical moments white men and Black men (because of their maleness) and white women (because of their gender and whiteness) had access to desirable jobs (with white men dominating all desirable occupational categories), Branch maintains that Black women experience virtually absolute disadvantage. Moreover, unlike white women, Black women’s gender offered no protection against exploitation. Following emancipation, Black women worked in the fields alongside men performing gruelling, backbreaking work just as they did during slavery. Branch asserts that, “Black women’s compulsory performance of men’s work in the field appears at odd in a society that crystallized gender roles, but their field work reinforced racial roles.” (27) Deeply entrenched ideas about racial and gender roles born in slavery were also reproduced in domestic work and on the factory floor. For Black women, domestic work was essentially a permanent, lifelong occupation, which did not lead to new occupational activity. In contrast, for white immigrant women, domestic work was a “bridging occupation.” It allowed them work to acquire new skills, resources and values, which helped with [End Page 331] their social mobility. For white immigrant women, their whiteness rather than domestic work itself then became the vehicle for upward mobility.

Race as opposed to skill determined the jobs workers were assigned, and when gender is accounted for, Black women were further disadvantaged particularly in meatpacking and slaughtering which was considered a men’s industry. Excluded from handling finished food products based supposedly on the public’s fear of their hands on meat, Black women were relegated to the most unattractive and disagreeable tasks in the meat factories where the work conditions were distasteful and unpleasant. A similar argument about public concerns was also used to virtually exclude Black women from clerical work. While the opening of new clerical occupations changed the work landscape for white women, it was not until 1950 that discernible effects were seen for Black women. Branch is reluctant to attribute Black women’s entrance into clerical work as a sign of changing attitudes on the part of employers. She maintains that white women were unable to keep up with the unprecedented growth of clerical work. She also adds that Black women eventually became overrepresented in clerical work due to employers’ investment in the supposed innate differences between men and women. Branch also insists, “employers did it as they always have always done in periods of labor shortage. They turned to workers lower in...

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