“The mothers are working”
On Monday, Philip Klinkner at PolySigh posted a graph of labor force participation rates by race and gender for the past 50 years.
I was generally aware of the overall trends, but was surprised at how low the labor force participation rates were for black women in the 1950s. Yes, they were a lot higher than for white women, but I’ve often heard comments to the effect of "black women have always worked; they didn’t have the privilege of being stay-at-home mothers even in the 1950s.
That’s certainly the impression that I got from reading The Street. We returned the book to the library yesterday, so I can’t post a direct quote, but Lutie Johnson (and presumably Ann Petry) lays the blame for most of the ills of black people on the fact that whites wouldn’t give black men jobs, but would hire the women as domestic servants. So the men felt emasculated and sought to prove themselves by fighting and sleeping around. And the children were left unsupervised in dangerous neighborhoods, and got sucked in by the attractive menace of the Street.
Petry also suggests that at least some of the huge increase in single-mother households over the past 50 years is illusory. Almost all of the women in The Street are technically still married, but living on their own or with men other than their husbands. They’re only married because they can’t afford to jump through all the hoops required to get a legal divorce at the time.
September 16th, 2005 at 11:51 am
Good point. Let’s not forget that the Southern congressmen got together when the minimum wage law was first enacted, to ensure that domestic workers were not covered by the minimum wage. So yes, black women got hired in higher percentages, but that was partly because they could be paid whatever the market would bear–and the market wasn’t very generous.