Lauren | Introduction

Throughout their history in America, Black women have not simply elected to work outside of their homes, but rather have done so out of sheer necessity to support their families and children. The disproportionately meager wages doled out to Black women have attempted to belie the undergirding value of their tireless labor both in the workforce and within the home. Even when White women finally entered the workforce at rates reminiscent of their Black counterparts, they held jobs such as peacetime factory labor and the traditional secretarial and sales roles from which the vast majority of Black women were still banned. Indeed, historically, Black wives and mothers have occupied the labor force in greater numbers only to hold jobs with inferior status and wages, factors characterizing Black women’s labor throughout American history. In light of the jarringly simple reminder that African-Americans were brought to this land with the specific purpose of having their physical and reproductive labor exploited, this paper will consider this enduring legacy work by examining the value that professional African-American, specifically in the legal field, place on their careers in their self-conception of their identities and success.

Following, the Jim Crow era, when, in some parts of the country, the struggles for equal rights had won Black women their first opportunities to pursue educational and career opportunities that had previously been withheld from them on account of their race and gender, how did these levels of relative freedom affect their decisions to marry and raise families? Or perhaps to be more considerate of the gender and cultural expectations of the era, how did their expectations to marry and raise families influence their career decisions?

Indeed, I am seeking to uncover how the intersections of race, class and the historical gendered expectations so deeply rooted in the Black community simultaneously operate to inform the career choices of Black women. I argue that, faced with less overt racial and sex-based discrimination and ascending to new levels of economic, social and political success, African-American women often still found their focus on the uplift of nuclear families and community to be more important to their self-conceptions of success than escalating the corporate and professional ladders.