Abstract
The integration of work and family has always been a struggle for Black women, but as the anthropologist Riché J. Daniel Barnes notes, in this era educated, professional Black women develop strategic mothering that reflect their class status. Like all contemporary mothers, there is much negotiating, since professional workplaces have not adapted to ease the integration of work and family, but Black women also have the burden of representing the race and contradicting stereotypes.
Barnes grounds her qualitative research in the history of work and family for Black women, who historically did not leave the workplace when they became mothers. Those who secured an education used their skills in employment, essential income for their families, as well as raise healthy young people and contribute to community uplift. An ideology shaped in the days of Jim Crow is modified in this era of integration, when it is possible for some married Black women to leave the labor force, because their spouses earned the salaries to support the family. This history is important, since rather than follow mainstream culture, these educated Black women are part of families with communal traditions and expectations about motherhood. They hold a collective memory of the vulnerability of African American families in the face of racial oppression that limited economic and social life. Many white professional women may have dreamt of having it all, some leaving jobs to devote their time and skills to childrearing and related activities. Barnes offers details to provide an alternative lens on how Black women employ strategies to pursue careers, raise families, maintain marriages, and meet expectations of extended family members while also confronting racism in various forms. Like other families in the country, their plans are challenged by an uncertain economy where corporate restructuring and layoffs demand adaptations, especially when women become mothers.
In in-depth interviews and observations with 23 married Black women in the Atlanta area between 2004 and 2007 and follow-up interviews in 2012 to look at the impact of 2008 recession, Barnes notes patterns of adaptation. She uses the categories of modified full-time-career mom, modified stay-at-home mom, and available flexible-career mom to identify women’s shifting commitments to the demands of mother, wife, and worker. Juggling these demands can be complex; while Barnes’ three categories are expansive and women change over time, they are consistent in their devotion to their children and their marriages. The women, mostly in the 30s and 40s, come from different social class backgrounds that include solid middle class to first-generation college graduates, but they share a cultural ethos that values religion and family stability.
Traditionally Black middle class families depended on extended families for help with child rearing. Yet, these upper middle-class families, some of whom relocated to Atlanta for education or work, find themselves resolving the child care dilemma by women reducing work commitments. In the process, women who were raised not to be dependent on men struggle to adjust. However, most are not just raising children but joining the ranks of people in nonstandard work as they enter real estate, consulting, aid their husband’s business, and other entrepreneurial pursuits, making them modified stay-at-home moms or flexible-career women. Standard employment provides health insurance, so women work out arrangements to insure coverage for the family, especially if husbands are building independent businesses.
In the study, there is little attention to workplace dynamics and social policies, like generous maternity leave and state-sponsored child care, but these women are generally conservative and seek individual solutions. We also learn little about their interactions with coworkers and possible tensions we know from other scholarship that Black women face in high-powered positions. Barnes’ focus is truly on the family, and her unique contribution is discussing how Black women raised to be independent make accommodations to marriage and children. She addresses a neo-politics of respectability that means making marriage and children a major focus of their lives to challenge stereotypes about race and gender. As they select neighborhoods and schools for their children, the women engage in a concerted cultivation not aimed at assimilation, but grounded in cultural heritage and pride in Blackness. They want their children to be authentically Black to other Black Americans and not “ghetto” or “hood” to white Americans, yet goals are complicated by old and new residential and educational segregation. At a time when people are debating about post-racism, this study makes it clear how racism is always in the background of people’s thinking. These women face these difficult times bearing the responsibility of presenting themselves as acceptable Black ladies and cultivating the next generation.