Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935

CHAPTER 3. I Want to Save These Girls: Single Black Women and Their Protectors, 1895–1911

91 3 i want to save these girls SINGLE BLACK WOMEN AND THEIR PROTECTORS, 1895–1911 I was born a slave, and my kin were sold away from me. I dare not raise my hand against a little child I may see in the street, for I do not know but she may be my own kin. . . . I want to save these girls. Their souls are as precious in the sight of the Master as yours and mine. —Victoria Earle Matthews, 1899 The need of protecting working women, as a means of raising the standards of living and improving the moral life, is one to which thinkers and workers among the whites are very keenly alive. The need of protecting women who are seeking employment and who are, therefore, exposed to many more dangers because of their lack of money, work and friends, is a newer thought, and one which has a direct bearing on the progress of the Negro race. —Frances Kellor, 1905 Social welfare campaigns aimed at protecting single, black women in New York underline the significance of black women’s urban presence at the turn of the century. Reformers shared W. E. B. Du Bois’s fear that “excess” working-class black women caused problems within their communities.1 While Du Bois emphasized that single black women in the city jeopardized the stability of black families, other reformers responded by invoking the need for black women’s protection. Instead of stressing the defense of black womanhood by black men, these reform activists sought to assist and instruct young black women, especially southern migrants, as they adjusted to urban life, thereby safeguarding both black and white communities from a seemingly dangerous element within the black working class. 92 AFRICAN AMERICAN URBAN LIFE For the most part, efforts to protect black women looked similar to those undertaken on behalf of immigrant and white women. In the multipronged strategy typical of Progressive Era urban reform, activists sought to reform the labor system through regulation of corrupt employment agencies , train migrant women to be efficient employees, and provide respectable leisure activities as an alternative to dance halls and other commercial amusements, which reformers perceived as immoral and leading vulnerable young women into prostitution. Although these efforts to protect workingclass women from economic and sexual exploitation appear similar across racial lines, they actually proceeded from different motives and assumptions and were shaped by black and nonblack women’s differing relations to the female labor market. This chapter explores the crosscurrents of social reform for black women in NewYork through the distinct perspectives and activities of Victoria Earle Matthews and Frances Kellor. Both used social-scientific investigations in order to secure suitable employment for working-class black women and to prevent their wayward behavior and moral downfall. Race and access to state power distinguished the development and trajectory of their efforts.2 Without local or state assistance, black reformers depended upon their own community’s limited resources to assist migrant women. They believed that addressing the needs of working-class women was part of the collective responsibility of the black middle class.3 White reformers, in contrast, had amassed significant support from local and state institutions, and their investment in campaigns for black women’s protection was an extension of their social welfare work with white native-born and immigrant workingclass women. Victoria Earle Matthews’s determination to “save these girls” represented the concerns of many black women activists.4 Like many black reformers, Matthews was haunted by the legacy of enslavement, which not only influenced interactions among black people but, more importantly, shaped perceptions of black womanhood. When white reformers who were anxious about the alleged increase in prostitution among white native-born and immigrant women emphasized the involuntary character of their sexual exploitation by using the loaded term “white slavery,” Matthews and her cohort sought to show that young black girls were also victims of sexual procurers and predators. Although her invocation of religion reflects the influence of nineteenth-century evangelical reform, she utilized social-scientific methods to research social problems, from the convict lease system in the South to “houses of ill-fame” in the North.5 The latter investigation eventually led her to open the White Rose Mission Working Girls’ Home, a black 93 Single Black Women and Their Protectors settlement home in New York City. While addressing a pressing need, the Home also fulfilled the black...