Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump
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Patricia Bell-Scott is one of the few scholars to provide insight into Pauli Murray’s hesitance to participate in the PCSW . She writes: John Kennedy’s charm held no sway with Murray. Yes, she could not ignore the importance of the commission’s charge or its stature. That Eleanor Roosevelt, Caroline Ware, and National Council of Negro women president Dorothy Height were part of this powerhouse ensured that the work would be of high quality and taken seriously…. Because Murray had more than twenty years of experience as a scholar and an activist in the areas of race and sex discrimination, the group asked her to draft an informational memorandum on women’s constitutional rights that considered the feasibility of a constitutional amendment. To be working with the PCSW under Eleanor Roosevelt’s leadership and to be appointed tutor of law at Yale, which gave her junior faculty status, made Murray as excited as a “puppy with two tails,” which was her favorite expression.15
In Brittney C. Cooper’s groundbreaking book, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, she provides new insight into the leadership of Pauli Murray . Cooper argues that Murray’s personal papers at the Schlesinger Library and her two autobiographies, Proud Shoe: The Story of an American Family and Song in a Weary Throat, teach us that Murray’s conceptualization of Jane Crow is one of the earliest conceptualizations of intersectional theory within Black Feminist thought.
When she served on one of the subcommittees of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, Murray wrote a memorandum and personally walked it around to key senators on Capitol Hill, whose votes were necessary to make sure the word “sex” remained in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Not only did Murray’s advocacy on behalf of the Civil Rights Act help ensure the inclusion of legal protection against sex discrimination, but she also laid the legal scaffolding for Kimberle Crenshaw’s intersectional arguments about Black women’s status as a protected legal class a quarter-century later.
Her contributions were invaluable to the Fourth Consultation. The report of the Fourth Consultation addressed five issues: (1) Negro family patterns , (2) employment opportunities , (3) vocational guidance , (4) community service and participation , and (5) adult education —and presented several relevant suggestions to enhance the roles of Black women in American society. The following section discusses these five issues and includes relevant background information about the women who participated in discussions and the formulation of recommendations regarding each issue.
Negro Family Patterns
One of the concerns of the PCSW was the matter of what it referred to as Negro family patterns. Drawing upon empirical and qualitative studies, the PCSW articulated how larger social trends, including educational access and utilization, shaped relationships, particularly within Black families. The report of the PCSW subcommittee cites a study of Negro women by Dr. Jeanne L. Noble , a doctoral dissertation titled “The Negro Woman’s College Education,” which contended that Negro women generally based their educational choices on perceived and actual vocational opportunities. Noble, herself a graduate of Howard University, served as president of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority from 1958 to 1963. She completed her master’s and doctoral degrees at the Teachers College of New York’s Columbia University. According to Paula Giddings , in the early fifties Dr. Noble contended that significant tensions existed within Black communities that could be attributed to gender differences. Giddings argued that the tension was exacerbated by the tendency of middle-class Black women to make independent decisions about engaging in relationships, irrespective of the marriage and childbearing trends of the period. Noble’s study indicated that 75% of the college graduates she studied got married three to four years after graduation, while 16% waited more than seven years to marry. At the time, deferred marriage was unusual because the national median age for women to marry was 20.
Giddings also concludes that in a period when the average Black mother had four children and the average white mother had three, 38% of the women in Noble’s study had one child. Fifteen percent had two children, and only six percent had three to six children. An overwhelming 41% had no children. Noble’s explanation of these childbearing patterns among college-educated Black women is that the women in her study rejected the pressure to conform to dominant social expectations about the sexual and domestic “obligations” of women.
This pressure and expectation was a real one, and the members of the Commission had themselves adopted and perpetuated these norms. The participants in the Fourth Consultation blamed Black women for the destruction of the Black family, caused by their own “selfish” academic and professional ambitions. Commission members articulated their concern that the Negro male would be unable to assume the expected masculine role of defender, protector, and provider of the family under such conditions, particularly when his options were already limited by the constraints imposed by societal racism.
One of the most vocal members of the Fourth Consultation to express discontent with the status of the Negro family was Alice Allison Dunnigan . Dunnigan was the first Black woman to receive a prominent position in a presidential administration. Born in 1906, she was an educator, politician, and journalist. She received a teaching certificate from Kentucky State College and continued her studies in 1930 at West Kentucky Industrial College, where she received the first home economics certificate ever awarded by that institution. Dunnigan became a federal employee and worked her way through the ranks of the civil service. She also became chief of the Washington Bureau of the Associated Negro Press , the first Black woman to be admitted to the Capitol and White House Press Corps, and the first Black correspondent to travel with a President of the USA when she accompanied President Truman during the 1948 campaign. Her background in education, government service, and news reporting led to her appointment as education consultant to President Kennedy’s Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity . In this position, Dunnigan conferred with labor and industry representatives about how best to assure equal job opportunities for minorities.
In the April 19, 1963, meeting of the Consultation on Problems of Negro Women , Dunnigan articulated a different interpretation of Negro family patterns that challenged the majority opinion of the PCSW . Dunnigan surmised that Black families were inherently more matriarchal than white families because Black men were often prevented from obtaining gainful employment congruent with their skills and qualifications due to entrenched racism. Curiously, Black women had a comparatively easier time obtaining employment—while affected by racism, Black women were viewed as uniquely qualified for certain types of jobs, especially domestic work. As a result of this strange mechanism of the intersection of racism and sexism , Black women often became their families’ breadwinners. Dunnigan’s theory was met with resistance from the other members of the commission, including Dorothy Height .
Despite the commission’s reluctance to admit the possibility of the legitimacy of Dunnigan’s ideas, she did, in fact, have some support. Deborah Wolfe and Inabel Burns Lindsay were in agreement with Dunnigan’s argument regarding the matriarchal family among Black communities. Wolfe served as education chief for the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor from 1962 to 1965. In this position, she was instrumental in the development, passage, and implementation of some of the most innovative educational legislation written. She graduated from New Jersey State Teachers’ College in 1937 with a degree in education. She earned her master’s degree in rural education from Columbia University Teacher’s College in 1938, and her doctorate from Columbia in 1945.
Inabel Burns Lindsay (1900–1983) served for 22 years as the dean of the Howard University School of Social Work, which she helped establish in the late 1930s. She received her master’s degree from the University of Chicago in social work in 1937 and her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh in 1952. In the April 19, 1963, discussion about the female-headed household, Wolfe and Lindsay indicated their receptivity to Dunnigan’s ideas and challenged the Commission to think more deep
ly about the potential impact of women’s breadwinner roles on all members of Black families and, by extension, Black communities. These women concluded that the responsibility of the Commission was to acknowledge the reality of Negro family patterns and to devise policy and program recommendations that would alleviate stressors on all family members.
The Commission did acknowledge the complexity of social influences upon the Negro family . Within the meetings it was acknowledged that more Negro women attended college and held college degrees than Negro males and because of these circumstances, Negro women frequently married below their educational standard. This phenomenon may have resulted in the woman earning more money than her husband. In such cases, the Black male partner often felt insecure or envious, feelings, which potentially precipitated the dissolution of families, thereby perpetuating the matriarchal family pattern. The consultation concluded that the matriarchal family type, in turn, caused problems for Negro children, both boys and girls, in developing their masculine or feminine roles.
On a practical level, the consultants expressed the strong hope that the Commission would advocate for more community childcare facilities, open to children of all economic levels and through all means—public, cooperative, and private. However, several participants stated that the establishment of additional childcare services should not be part of a program to try to force mothers of young children into the labor market by taking away public assistance. The final suggestion was that public assistance legislation be further improved to strengthen family life. Amendments were passed in 1961 to provide federal funds on a matching basis to states whose laws provided AFDC based on need, regardless of whether there was an employable male in the household. This remains an important issue because many states have not accepted the effort to maintain and strengthen family life during periods of economic dislocation. In fact, in many jurisdictions the unemployed father is, in effect, encouraged to desert his family in order for the family to be eligible for public aid.
Employment Opportunities
The PCSW subcommittee on Negro women’s issues considered two facets of employment opportunity . The first was a look at white-collar, semi-professional, and professional opportunities; the second explored the issues of domestic household workers. One of the major problems identified was that Negro women often found that jobs were available to them only at the lowest economic and professional levels, whereas sales and clerical jobs were closed to them. The report explained, for example, that Negro women had difficulty obtaining secretarial jobs, since a major means of entering the secretarial field at that time was through graduation from a recognized business or secretarial school. Many of these schools, however, did not admit Negroes. The consultants’ suggested remedy for this problem was vocational legislation. They advocated that the Manpower Training and Development Act be broadened so that the preparation and placement of Negro women workers in its programs for job training and retraining were expanded.
As was the case with family patterns, the topic of employment opportunities was a point of divisiveness among the members, and their diverse views resulted in fragmentation with respect to both philosophical and pragmatic treatments of the subject of employment. Some participants emphasized the widespread desire among Negro workers to move upward out of what they considered to be undesirable occupations. Others said that since many Negroes undoubtedly would continue to be in household work, upgrading skills and improvements in employment conditions was desirable.
In a discussion of the basic need for broadening opportunities for those in household employment, two additional approaches were suggested: (1) unionization of household workers to establish decent wages, hours, and standards of working conditions, and (2) facilities to help those who were qualified or desired further training gain and access better employment opportunities . It was anticipated that both of these efforts could lead to greater interest and incentives on the job, while simultaneously increasing the sense of dignity necessary for good job performance.
The subcommittee also pointed out that Negro women employed in household service often lacked Social Security coverage, partly because many employers failed to pay contributions to old-age, survivors’, and disability insurance. The group urged that the federal government take further steps to enforce compliance with the law requiring that employers make Social Security contributions for these women and also to educate the Negro household worker about her rights and benefits under this program.
Vocational Guidance
Vocational guidance for youth was a significant concern of the consultation members. Following Brown v. Board of Education (1954), many Negro youth were enrolled in schools where only white high school guidance counselors were available to them. The guidance provided for Negro youth was often based on misconceptions of the intellectual abilities Black students, as well as a lack of awareness and knowledge about Black adults’ academic and professional opportunities and accomplishments. Participants in the Fourth Consultation felt that guidance counselors needed to promote opportunities for upward mobility among Negro youth and provide inspiration for setting and achieving higher goals. To this end, the Commission recommended that guidance counselors familiarize themselves with the academic and vocational resources available to all youth, and that the availability of those resources be made known and accessible to Negro youth.
The Commission seemed to understand that there were vocational guidance concerns that were specific to young Black females. Wolfe noted that there were likely overlaps between the organization of Negro family patterns and the academic opportunities and vocational guidance provided to Negro youth. Wolfe suggested that the disempowered Negro man, essentially emasculated by his breadwinner wife, was largely uninvolved in his children’s academic and vocational lives, and that the Negro woman, already overextended with her own professional obligations, was confronted with the double bind of choosing between work and family or trying to be a woman who could juggle all of her obligations and fulfill her priorities with equal attention and effort. Wolfe even surmised that Negro women’s participation in the work was a factor that accounted for their lack of participation in community life in the roles of volunteers. According to Wolfe’s postulation, the Negro woman’s absence from public life, then, implied a variety of negative outcomes with respect to vocational guidance for Negro youth, albeit unintentionally.
Community Service and Participation
The Commission viewed community service and participation as a matter of importance because its members believed that if Blacks—and Black women, in particular—played a more visible role in public and political life, their concerns would organically work their way onto local, state, and federal agendas. One of the major recommendations of the consultants was for Negro women to participate on policy-making boards at local, state, and federal levels. They argued that it was particularly important for Negro women to serve on decision-making bodies on behalf of the community, which would benefit not only them and their children, but also many white children. Many white children at that time had seen Negroes only as domestic workers, and therefore grew up to be white adults who had never had a peer relationship with Negroes. The subcommittee anticipated that revitalized policies could result in improved community relationships.
Adult Education
Adult education was an area of great pertinence to Negro women and was another central concern of the committee. Of the 3.8 million functionally illiterate citizens in the USA at that time, many were Negroes. Although a recommendation intended to remedy the problem of the paucity of educational opportunities for adults was not offered by the Fourth Consultation, a reference to the fact that the issue was discussed extensively leads one to think that more information may be available in the transcripts of the meetings. What can be surmised with confidence is that the very appearance of this issue on a federal-level commission’s agenda brought the issue to the consciousness of policy-makers and just a decade later, significant educational reform w
as legislated that improved educational access and equality for women and men alike.
Biography as History: The Black Women on the Commission
In order to understand the context in which the work of the commission occurred and the people and personalities who shaped its discussions, decisions, and recommendations, it is important to examine the personal histories of the Black women who served on the commission. Alice Allison Dunnigan , Inabel Burns Lindsay , Geraldyn Hodges Major, Lillian Holland Harvey , and Lorraine Hansberry are introduced here, with their personal biographical information and significant political and social contributions—both to their communities and to the commission—highlighted. The reader sees that as diverse as these women’s backgrounds and demographic characteristics were, they shared some common concerns that arose from similar experiences, and thus, they were able to engage in fruitful discussion and action in their collaborative work on the commission.
Alice Allison Dunnigan , a member of the Consultation on Problems of Negro Women , was the first Black American woman reporter to gain access to the press galleries of the US Capitol and be accredited to the White House and the State Department. The daughter of a sharecropper, Dunnigan, was born on August 27, 1906, in Russelville, Kentucky, the youngest child of Willie and Lena (Pittman) Allison. In the Black Women’s Oral History Project , she referred to her parents as common laboring people. She grew up in a rural area, about two miles from what she called a very small village. Because her father was a sharecropper, he didn’t receive money until the end of the year when the tobacco crop was sold. To help out with the family financial situation, Alice’s mother did laundry.