Paper Proposal

For over three centuries African American women have balanced their roles as productive participants in the workforce while upholding traditions of mothering for racial liberation, cultural pride, and community uplift. As Evelyn Nakano argues, it is important to consider simultaneously “women’s relation to the family, the labor market and the larger political economy in which both family and employment are embedded” (1995). While the broader, mainstream account of women’s entrance into the American workforce is rather extensive, less discussed is African-Americans’ women in this narrative. Dominant white-middle class social norms conflicted both with African-based attitudes towards female productive and reproductive labor, and also the realities of African-American women’s working lives within the United States.

During the Civil Rights Movement, African American women had their hopes and aspirations for greater educational and professional opportunities increased. They anticipated that government policies, including affirmative action, educational grants and loans, government funding for small businesses and the like, would result in unlimited opportunities for African Americans, including women. Indeed, it was during the subsequent years that African American women made their greatest occupational gains and the income gap between African American women and men was substantially narrowed.

I would like my paper to contextualize these women’s entrances and experiences into the professional fields with their traditional ties to motherhood and homemaking duties. My paper will argue that African-American women’s exploration into the professional realms have been limited to certain fields due to how closely the intertwining of their identities as women with concept of motherhood. Even the professions to which black women initially flocked, and continue to populate in high numbers, such as teaching school, nursing and social work, are all viewed as “motherly” or “helping” professions. For example, Catalyst researchers concluded that African-American women are the most underrepresented ethnic group of women in management positions of private sector companies (Bell & Nkomo 2001). Even today, Ursula Burns is the only Black female head of a Fortune 500 corporation.

I hope to find, as primary sources, autobiographical or memoir narratives, or even interview, African-American women with post-graduate degrees. Stephanie Shaw’s What a Woman Ought to Be and Do, an account of African-American professional women during the Jim Crow era. I would also love to find accounts from women in fields such as medicine, law, business and academia. I am also interested in exploring the portrayals of Black professional women through the lens of twentieth century media such as The Cosby Show’s Claire Huxtable. In analyzing the formation and purpose of upper-class African-American cultural institutions such as the mother’s organizations Jack and Jill of America, Inc., one can see how closely linked professional African-American women were with the idea of motherhood.

While I hope to create a bold, yet logical narrative, I am not sure if the evidence I gather will align with my preliminary thesis. My perfunctory research is demonstrating that while Black women do tend to value motherhood a great deal, they are much likelier to be working mothers than their counterparts of other ethnic groups. They also tend, anecdotally, to have higher aspirations of management and executive positions as college students than do White and Latino women. In light of some of the evidence I have found so far, I am not sure if my evidence will allow me to explain Black women’s lack of representation in the professional fields requiring post-graduate degrees through the lens Black women’s close ties to motherhood.