In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Women's History 15.4 (2004) 217-219



[Access article in PDF]

Race, Sex, and Women's Work

Stephanie J. Shaw


Sharon Harley and The Black Women and Work Collective, eds. Sister Circle: Black Women and Work. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London, 2002. xxii + 288 pp.; ISBN 0-8135-30135-3-61-x (pb).

The Black Women and Work Collective, a group of scholars based at the University of Maryland-College Park and funded as a research seminar by the Ford Foundation, has produced a book about black women and work that ought to be read for a variety of reasons. As the title suggests, it is a book about black women workers and black women's work, but, equally important, it is a study of class and sex, race and gender, politics and culture. The essays in the volume contribute to scholarly discussions of economics, history, religion, sociology, law, anthropology, public policy, and literary and visual art. As a volume that reveals as much about the authors as the women they study, this book is layered in rich and unusual ways.

The fourteen essays in this book are organized into four sections. While these sections are clearly and logically demarcated, there are other ways one might consider the themes suggested by the essays that further reveal their connectedness. Some of them provide a traditional biographical treatment of not-so-traditional subjects. Sharon Harley's article, "'Working for Nothing but for a Living,'" for example, reconstructs the life of Odessa Madre, a major figure in organized crime (numbers writing, bootlegging, and prostitution) in Washington, D.C. from the 1930s to the 1950s. And Francille Rusan Wilson examines the efforts of Sadie T. M. Alexander to create a professional life for herself, first as an economist, then as an attorney, at a time when neither women (especially married women) nor black people were welcomed into the fields.

Some of the studies combine biography with the history of black women's activism. Melinda Chateauvert's study of Rosina Corrothers Tucker's work on the Sleeping Car Porters, Shirley Wilson Logan's essay about Anna Julia Cooper, and Carla L. Peterson's essay on the ways in which black and white antebellum women used rights rhetoric come to mind. Other authors put women artists in the context of their art. Mary Helen Washington's examination of some of Paule Marshall's writings draws parallels between the middle-class women about whom Marshall writes and her own life. Deborah Willis's autobiographical essay discusses her life as an artist, but it might also be biographical in that it details every [End Page 217] woman's efforts to find art in everyday objects and beauty in everyday people. Marilyn Mobley McKenzie's essay similarly is her own story and the story of black women in the academy in general who struggle to balance the demands of the tenure and promotion process with the needs of the various client-constituencies (students, colleagues, administrators, and community) who are drawn to them for a variety of reasons. Rhonda M. Williams (who died during the production of this work and to whom the volume is dedicated) studied the scholarship of black women economists in a field less traditionally associated with activism, within an essay that looks at the study of economics in general.

Other essays pay more attention to the organization of work. Bonnie Thornton Dill and Tallese Johnson's essay on poor, rural women, while telling a familiar story about the impossibility of living on welfare, is poignant in its detail about how hard poor people work, how difficult it is to get work in rural communities, and the virtual impossibility of creating a decent standard of life through work or welfare or both. A. Lynn Bolles's essay breaks down the tourism industry in Jamaica, which, it turns out, is driven by women workers. She looks at how the women organize their work at home, how class and color influence their efforts, and how class and color influence the structure of their work in the industry...

pdf

Share