Abstract
“I knew I wasn’t ever going to be rich. I just wanted a good education so I could get a good job, a better job, paid more than what my mother was making,” Rodie Veazy said in her interview. “But I have worked as hard as my mother,” she concluded. Here Veazy and other narrators tell about what work meant, what it was like, and how it changed, or didn’t, across the generations of women in their families. Work was one of the defining features of black women’s lives in the Jim Crow South, and all of our informants were employed in at least one job throughout their lives, while also carrying responsibilities for work in their own homes.
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Notes
On black women and work, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1985);
Tera Hunter, To’ Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
On girls and household labor, see Elizabeth Clark Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C. 1910–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); see also
Sharon Harley, ed., Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
Elizabeth Ross Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States,” Journal of Negro History 8 (October 1923): 384–432;
Elizabeth Clark Lewis, “This Work Had an End’: African American Domestic Workers in Washington, D.C. 1910–1940,” in Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton, eds., To Toil the Livelong Day: American Women at Work. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 196–212.
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), 307;
Gerda Lerner, Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 226.
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).
Stephanie Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Women Professional Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
On the role of black teachers, see Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007);
Sonya Y. Ramsey, Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008);
Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir (New York: The Free Press, 1983).
On unions in Memphis, see Michael Honey, Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
Laurie Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
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© 2010 Anne Valk and Leslie Brown
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Valk, A., Brown, L. (2010). You Are All Under Bondage, Which Is True: Working Lives. In: Living with Jim Crow. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109872_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230109872_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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