Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri (review)

Rebecca Tuuri's Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle does some heavy lifting. Strategic Sisterhood is the first of its kind to provide a thoroughgoing, compelling, and materially grounded overview of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an umbrella organization founded by humanitarian and educator Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The organization is still in existence today, with scholar and former president of Bennet College, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, as its seventh president. Drawing on archival research, traditional scholarship, interviews, photographs, and the memoirs of its leaders, specifically that of the council's fourth and longest running president, Dr. Dorothy Height, whose presidency spanned the years 1957 to 1998, Tuuri attempts to disrupt and simultaneously amend "influential histories of the postwar Black freedom struggle," that obfuscate or outright ignore the contributions of "Black middle-class women such as those of the NCNW" (p. 1).

Her argument in Strategic Sisterhood is against metanarratives suggesting "the council shrunk from real activism in hopes of preserving their respectability" and status within and beyond the United States. Tuuri asserts that in drawing on its "positions of power" as a politically and socially (and, in its first twenty-five years, integrationist) council of respectable women, the NCNW aided more radical causes, were the "backbone" of the modern civil rights movement, and participated behind the scenes in and informed important civil rights legislation (p. 2).

Divided into eight chapters, Strategic Sisterhood includes an introduction, conclusion, appendices, in-depth notes, an index of names and sources, and a substantial and interdisciplinary bibliography. Each of the book's eight chapter details some aspect of the NCNW's history since its founding, and the council's work on behalf of the Black Freedom Struggle. In the opening chapter entitled, "Maneuvering for the Movement: The World of Broker Politics," Tuuri quotes Bethune as stating, "If I should tap you with one finger, you may not even know that you have been touched. If I use two fingers, you may know that you were tapped. But if I bring all the fingers of my hand into a fist, I can give a mighty blow" (p. 14). Throughout this and chapters to follow, Tuuri highlights the great work the council did with respect to anti-poverty measures in the U.S. and in parts of Africa (i.e. establishment of Head Start centers in Mississippi, housing projects funded by the government, important civil rights legislation such as the 1965 Voting Rights Act, etc.), as well as highlights the ways the council used this anti-poverty work, and respectability politics, to grow in power and prestige. Between the mid-1960s and into the 1970s, the NCNW collaborated with private and government sectors in an effort to consolidate power, adopt to a steadily changing political climate, and to secure necessary and basic human rights and needs for the poor generally, and for Black people specifically.

Accessible if overlong, Strategic Sisterhood enhances knowledge of the link between the NCNW and the Black Freedom Struggle, and of post-WWII politics, and the measures women, Black women in particular, had to go through to access and maintain power. Additionally, the book establishes the interrelationship between Black clubwomen and U.S. Black feminism. Strategic Sisterhood thus pairs well with Kimberly Springers' Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968–1980 (2005).