Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars

1 FROM UPLIFT TO NEW NEGRO MARRIAGES: Changing Ideals of Sexuality and Activism in African American Marriages, 1890–1940

The Curwoods found themselves in a marital relationship during a time of changing ideals about marriages. Although they often saw themselves engaged in a personal drama of love and intimacy, their experience took place against a backdrop of contending prescriptions for how African Americans should mold their marriages for the good of the race. These ideals, as we shall see in later chapters, seeped into their daily lives together. They did so in the context of the changing importance of sexuality and race work (what turn-­of-­ the-­ century African Americans called civil rights) within an ideal African American marriage. Sexuality was becoming more central, while race work was no longer so crucial . At the turn of the twentieth century, for those of any race, African American public culture presented female chastity and morality as the cornerstones of a respectable middle-­ class marriage. In addition , marital partners were often assumed to be teammates working to promote the progress of the race. Like white Americans, these From Uplift to NewNegro Marriages 1 African American Marriages, 1890–1940 Changing Ideals of Sexuality and Activism in  14 changing ideals of sexuality and activism African Americans thought that a strong family life was the basis for Progress, though they added racial uplift to their list of Progress’s fruits. Between 1920 and World War II, however, this would change. African Americans’ views on marriage became a complex blend of older uplift mentalities and newer pragmatic standards. From a previous emphasis on respectability, African Americans developed a limited acceptance of sexuality separate from reproduction and began to believe that respectable women might earn wages. These changing attitudes toward marriage and, within it, sexuality were by no means uniform and undisputed. Although many Americans (including African Americans) became more comfortable talking about reproduction and sexuality, and even sexuality as separate from reproduction, many remained cautious about losing older standards. For African Americans, discussions of sexuality could be especially fraught because of old stereotypes of black hypersexuality. By World War II, then, the uplift function of marriage would combine with a complicated mixture of romance, more visible sexuality, evolving gender roles, and middle-­ class racial strivings.1 In this chapter, I first examine African Americans’ middle-­ class sexuality and gender ideals between Reconstruction and 1920. In this era, “chastity and continence” (code words for sex inside marriage and for procreation only) were seen as the prerequisites for both family health and racial health. I then look at husbands’ and wives’ collaboration on the advancement of the race. These uplift-­ era marriages were a model to aspire to and, especially for women, could be an entry into race politics. In the second part of this chapter, I discuss shifts in marriage and sexuality ideals in U.S. culture after World War I, both in the larger culture and among African Americans specifically . Earlier imperatives of respectability and strictly defined gender roles came into uneasy coexistence with more tolerant, but more ambiguous, views of sexuality and husbands’ and wives’ roles. Finally, I describe marriage as it was represented in the literature and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s. This discussion shows how the tug-­ of-­ war between older and newer romantic and sexual ideals played out in the imaginations of African Americans who were the Curwoods’ contemporaries. 15  changing ideals of sexuality and activism Uplift: Respectable Husbands and Wives Between 1890 and 1920, the nature of racial politics and the Victorian ideals of the dominant culture placed a priority on appropriate enactments of sexuality. Middle-­class African Americans at the turn of the century saw marriage as a signifier for sexual morality in a time when all black people were stereotyped as immoral. Michele Mitchell has vividly described the minefield of sexual behavior that African Americans negotiated. She argues that elite African Americans in the late nineteenth century sought to show how black women had overcome the sexual legacy of slavery. Slavery, they said, had encouraged black women’s depraved sexuality and distorted relationships between black males and females. Therefore, they demanded that women demonstrate a chastity that was beyond reproach and that men show appropriate manliness— ​ which included heading a patriarchal household. Any expression of sexuality could raise fears that a black person would be seen as morally degenerate.2 African Americans responded by turning inward and focusing on domesticity: poor households plagued with illness and illegitimate children should be replaced with morally upright ones...