.... A third group included the Young Men's Christian Association women, who staffed “canteens” designed to improve soldier morale and deflect them from patronizing prostitutes. This group was the only one that included African American women. A final contingent consisted of the reporters and writers who were...

... and medical care was not adequately accessible, these interventions particularly targeted poor African American women. Racism was at the root of many attempts to control pregnant women’s bodies. In both cases, child abuse statutes were utilized in ways that did not protect children and often caused clear harm...

.... The federal government hired African American women as manual laborers and clerks, though in far fewer numbers than it hired white women. Women’s letters reveal that they yearned for intellectually demanding and high-paying jobs in a land of limited options for female employment. Applications of Female...

...This book is an examination of late-twentieth-century African American women in the historical profession that begins with Fannie Barrier Williams's 1905 commentary on “the colored girl.” Williams's words and experiences resonate in the autobiographies compiled in this volume, and in the history...

...This chapter examines how Frances Ellen Watkins Harper deployed motherhood—in which the mother's body becomes "two" via her child—to advocate for African American women's equality. It concentrates on two complications in Watkins Harper's poetry which speak to how violent forces dismantle...

... African American women and confronting poverty in postwar Philadelphia Employment of African American men Family wage ideology Redd Jessie Elkins Corrine Starks Arlene Igra Anna R Jackson Bell Jordan Edwina Jews Morris Ada Park Joan Weinberg Hazel Barnett Pauline Racial discrimination...

...This chapter shows how working-class African American women were deeply enmeshed in the postwar transformation of public housing. Women initially approached public housing in Philadelphia with great enthusiasm because it offered a pleasant and affordable place to live in a city with few decent...

...This chapter examines the publicly provided health care at Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH), which was of critical importance to poor African American women, who needed a safe and respectful place to care for their own and their children's medical needs. This hospital was the most successful...

...As the HUD failed to provide adequate housing for African Americans, officials and media increasingly placed the blame on the African American homeowners. In many cases the focus was on African American women. Instead of attributing an abundance of foreclosures to the selling of dilapidated housing...

...In 1868, the state of Georgia began to make its rapidly growing population of prisoners available for hire. The resulting convict leasing system ensnared not only men but also African-American women, who were forced to labor in camps and factories to make profits for private investors. This book...

... Moore Amzie National Welfare Rights Organization NWRO Poor People’s Campaign Respectability South Africa Swaziland Woodley Jenny National Council of Negro Women NCNW Dorothy Height Moderate black women Middle class blacks Black clubwomen Bridge leadership Racial uplift African American...

... feminism as emerging largely in protest against exclusion by white feminists or in opposition to Black Power. This book demonstrates that black women were present at the creation of postwar feminist movements and articulated a black feminist agenda based on their position as African American women who...

...This chapter explores women's desire to live as faithful Christians by focusing on the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) women in the late nineteenth century. It considers the reasons for African American women's involvement in church work after the Civil War in order to highlight the personal...

... Day Peace Mission magazine celibacy new religious movements race African American religion African American women Father Divine Peace Mission Movement In February 1954, Ebony magazine featured a photograph of the African American religious leader known as Father Divine seated...

... she earned in the factory, but assured her that she would earn more if her employer liked her work. Tobacco factory work was an onerous and dusty affair, requiring workers to spend hours on their feet doing repetitive tasks on the assembly line. African American women such as Washington usually...

...This chapter focuses on African American women's resistance to sexual violence during the transition from slavery to freedom and how their campaigns against rape influenced national debates about the emerging meanings of freedom and black citizenship. During Reconstruction, the Republican...

...This book takes up one crucial aspect of the “woman question” debate: the extent to which African American women would exercise autonomy and authority within their community's public culture. Black activist thought on the question changed over the course of the century. In some cases convergences...

...This introduction contextualizes black women’s politics within the historical and social landscape of political culture in black Washington. While African American women’s political activism stretched back to the seventeenth century, it was during the 1920s and 1930s that their political campaigns...

...This introductory begins by discussing African American women's interactions with public institutions, which played a key role in the so-called “origins of the urban crisis”: the growing concentration of poverty among African Americans in postwar cities. It then sets out the book's purpose, which...

...This chapter summarizes the preceding discussions and presents some final thoughts. It describes how between 1945 and the early 1960s, working-class African American women claimed public institutions for themselves. In linking their fate to public institutions, women turned state programs...