Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work by Enobong Hanna Branch (review)

Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work is an examination of the evolution of black women’s work in the U.S. from the end of slavery into the twenty-first century. In sum, the author offers a convincing argument that black women, regardless of time and place, have been limited to the lowest rungs of occupational ladders. The status is not incidental but rather the outcome of white racism (on the part of women and men) and the intersection of employer racial and gender discrimination. Branch does not deny progress but asserts that steadfast occupational segregation by race and gender has historically defined black women’s place and experience at the “bottom of the labor queue” and this remains unchanged in the contemporary period.

Branch uses intersectional theory as a lens through which to understand the impact of race and gender on black women’s work. Consistent with this approach, she argues neither one nor the other alone is sufficient to explain the systems of power and oppression that define these experiences. Together, these variables outline how racism and sexism have worked in the past and persist into the present to locate black women in a disadvantaged market position, at the bottom of hierarchies of authority and power.

The subject of black women’s experiences and labor as products of race and intersectionality is not a new intervention to the literature. Branch, though a sociologist, offers a well-developed and insightful historiography of the scholarship on the subject. Much of her evidence, for example, builds on contemporary classic works of historians and social scientists alike, such as Jacqueline Jones, Judith Rollins, as well as David Roediger. This synthesis is essential to contextualizing the detailed trends of black women’s labor that are illustrated throughout the text. I would argue that the strength of the monograph is the effective blending and use of labor market data available through the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, a product of the U.S. Census Bureau that provides researchers access to untabulated historical data on housing units and people.

The book is well-organized thematically and chronologically (primarily from 1860–1960) around the type of work to which black women were restricted. Of course, during slavery this was agricultural and domestic servitude. This changed little as the population shifted into freedom and the twentieth century. Despite attempts to withdraw from farm labor, black women were coerced back into this “nontraditional” women’s work because of white demand for their labor. Black women in domestic service were, argues the author, “explicitly tied to the destination of household labor as women’s work.” However, black women’s ability to move into these latter positions outside the south was due to the desire of white women to distance themselves from this dirty, onerous, disdainful employment. While the changes for black women have been dramatic since the 1960s, Branch tempers these gains against the “artificially low wages in early decades of the twentieth century because of black women’s severe underrepresentation in desirable and lucrative jobs.” By 2008, black women were still unevenly tied to sex-segregated occupations, in which they fell at the wage and skill bottoms. How about skilled and educated black women? Have they fared better than those stationed at lower levels? By mid-twentieth century, educated black women, Branch asserts, advanced primarily due to opportunities in the public sector: health, social services, and education. However, this also meant that they were most vulnerable to public sector austerity that led to layoffs, early retirements, and downsizing of federal, state, and local governments.

For many, it is more popularly palatable to use those at the heights of income levels and success as measures of progress. Multimillionaire media giants such as Oprah Winfrey and Beyonce Knowles, Professors Anita Hill and Melissa Harris-Perry, political figures Michelle Obama, Condolezza Rice, and Susan Rice are all symbols of what is possible in the age of Obama and a supposed post...