Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit / Edition 1

by Victoria W. Wolcott

Overview

In the early decades of the twentieth century, tens of thousands of African Americans arrived at Detroit's Michigan Central Station, part of the Great Migration of blacks who left the South seeking improved economic and political conditions in the urban North. The most visible of these migrants have been the male industrial workers who labored on the city's automobile assembly lines. African American women have largely been absent from traditional narratives of the Great Migration because they were excluded from industrial work. By placing these women at the center of her study, Victoria Wolcott reveals their vital role in shaping life in interwar Detroit.

Wolcott takes us into the speakeasies, settlement houses, blues clubs, storefront churches, employment bureaus, and training centers of Prohibition- and depression-era Detroit. There, she explores the wide range of black women's experiences, focusing particularly on the interactions between working- and middle-class women. As Detroit's black population grew exponentially, women not only served as models of bourgeois respectability, but also began to reshape traditional standards of deportment in response to the new realities of their lives. In so doing, Wolcott says, they helped transform black politics and culture. Eventually, as the depression arrived, female respectability as a central symbol of reform was supplanted by a more strident working-class activism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849668
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	09/17/2001
Series:	Gender and American Culture
Edition description:	1
Pages:	360
Sales rank:	733,151
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Victoria W. Wolcott is assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester

Read an Excerpt

And Belle the classy dresser, where is she,
who changed her frocks three times a day?

Where's Nora, with her laugh, her comic flair,
stagestruck Nora waiting for her chance?

Where's fast Iola, who so loved to dance
she left her sickbed one last time to whirl
in silver at The Palace till she fell?

Where's mad Miss Alice, who ate from garbage cans?
Where's snuffdipping Lucy, who played us "chunes"

on her guitar? Where's Hattie? Where's Melissabelle?

Let vanished rooms, let dead streets tell.

—Robert Hayden, "Elegies for Paradise Valley"

In his poem "Elegies for Paradise Valley," Detroit native Robert Hayden invokes the forgotten women who walked the streets of Paradise Valley, Detroit's interwar black neighborhood. These intrepid women traveled from southern states such as Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama between 1915 and 1925 to build better lives for themselves and their families in Detroit. Many settled near Paradise Valley's heart—St. Antoine Street, which, recalls Hayden, teemed with "restaurants, barbershops, pool halls, cabarets, blind pigs, gamblin' joints camouflaged as 'Recreation Clubs.' Shootings, stabbings, blaring jazz, and a liveliness, a gaiety at once desperate and releasing, at once wicked—Satan's playground—and good hearted."[1] This book attempts to recapture the complexity of Hayden's childhood world, the good-heartedness, the gaiety, and the desperation.

In much the same way that "Recreation Clubs" could hide "gamblin' joints," a narrow focus on male industrial workers in Detroit's historiography has hidden the complexity of this city's African American community.[2] By focusing a narrative of migration and urban growth on African American women, who were excluded from industrial labor during the interwar period, this book views a Detroit that encompassed reformers, preachers, prostitutes, and domestic servants. This range of individual experiences complicated African American social reformers' attempts to construct a cohesive community identity during and after the Great Migration. African American women were at the center of these contestations over community formation as both symbols of racial reform and active agents of migration and urban resettlement. Understanding the variety of female experiences represented in Hayden's poem, therefore, is essential to understanding a broader story of African American life in the urban North.

This book employs two intertwined approaches to examine the lives of African American women. It is a women's history that uncovers some of the quotidian details of African American women's lives. Such detail prevents overgeneralizations about black women's ideologies, motivations, or class positions. A social history of black women also highlights their remarkable achievements in the face of racial discrimination practiced by white employers, landlords, police, and city officials. But Remaking Respectability is also a gender history that examines broad cultural, political, and economic shifts in Detroit's black community.[3] This gender analysis reveals a significant shift in racial discourse from a focus on bourgeois respectability in the 1910s and 1920s to a more masculine ideology of self-determination during the Great Depression.

Both approaches are structured by the nature of the available sources. Institutional histories and manuscript collections reveal much about the major reform organizations, uncovering fascinating changes in African American leaders' priorities and rhetoric. The personal papers and recorded oral histories of some African American women allow us to reflect on their daily struggles for respect and survival in the face of staggering obstacles. These sources, however, leave major gaps in our understanding of black women's lives. Migrants, for example, formed numerous working-class clubs that left almost no records behind. Reform institutions' manuscript collections rarely include clients' criticisms of their work. Oral histories often contain romanticized and selective visions of the past. As I worked with all of these sources, I was cognizant of their limitations and possibilities. Thus, the daily lives of ordinary African American women and the institutional context in which they operated are only partially revealed in this work. Yet access to a surprising amount of material previously unmined by historians allowed me to record community conversations about the role of black women in an industrial city.

The key to capturing these conversations was my examination of the interactions between African American women of different classes. In her study of blueswomen, Angela Davis argues that there are "multiple African American feminist traditions."[4] Until recently, black clubwomen and reformers who left behind written records have received the most scholarly attention as the source of these traditions.[5] This book takes reformers' work seriously by examining their role in defining institutional responses to the Great Migration. However, understanding the interaction between middle-class black women and the working-class migrants they sought to aid and influence is key to capturing the full range of African American women's experiences. This perspective necessitated that I study not only the "successful" migrants described in other works but also the "unsuccessful" migrants who have been largely lost to history.[6] Prostitutes, gamblers, and performers shaped black Detroit as vitally as club leaders, church founders, and social workers did. Some women remained desperately poor despite years of struggle to obtain viable employment, whereas others achieved significant social mobility.

In order to document the lives of migrants who did not fit into the model of respectable womanhood, I needed to confront Detroit's cultural history. Blueswomen's lyrics, accounts of numbers running, and ethnographies of storefront churches provide a glimpse of the lives of migrants who fell outside the norm. Indeed, it was in the realm of culture that reformers defined bourgeois respectability and their class status. "Middle-class blacks and members of the elite," argue Shane White and Graham White, "were keen to distance themselves from the dress and demeanor of ordinary African Americans, and, at the same time, to curb what they viewed as the sartorial and kinetic excesses of these they saw as their social inferiors."[7] Curbing these excesses was central to creating a respectable community identity. Yet cultural expressions of independence and creativity also challenged white stereotypes of the black working class and provided an expressive outlet for urban migrants.[8] Reformers' responses to migrant culture structured the institutions, politics, and local economy of interwar Detroit.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Female Uplift Ideology, the Politics of Class, and Resettlement in Detroit
2 Reform and Public Displays of Respectability in Great Migration Detroit
3 The Informal Economy, Leisure Workers, and Economic Nationalism in the 1920s
4 Neighborhood Expansion and the Decline of Bourgeois Respectability in the 1920s
5 Economic Self-Help and Black Nationalism in the Great Depression
6 Grassroots Activism, New Deal Policies, and the Transformation of African American Reform in the 1930s
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A most welcome breakthrough in the historiography of black Detroit that has been dominated by a focus on black men as the central agents of community building.—Michigan Historical Review



By focusing on the changing nature of their community work in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Wolcott adds significantly to our understanding not only of the history of African American women but also of the changing nature of black Detroit. All future work on either subject will need to take this book into account.—Anne Firor Scott, author of Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History

Editorial Reviews

By focusing on the changing nature of their community work in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Wolcott adds significantly to our understanding not only of the history of African American women but also of the changing nature of black Detroit. All future work on either subject will need to take this book into account. (Anne Firor Scott, author of "Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History")

From the Publisher

By focusing on the changing nature of their community work in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Wolcott adds significantly to our understanding not only of the history of African American women but also of the changing nature of black Detroit. All future work on either subject will need to take this book into account.

Anne Firor Scott