Race, Class and Marriage: Black Women,Social Mobility and the Companionate Marriage Ideal Open Access

Abstract

This dissertation examines African American professional wives and mothers enactment of marriage and motherhood. It demonstrates how African American middle class women are modifying their relationship with work and changing their understanding of marriage and motherhood to an ideal of companionate marriage as a marker of upper-middle class social position and attention to race and class reproduction. The emphasis on marriage and family stability, while solidifying their class-based identity, complicates their racialized and gendered identity and forces a reconciliation between the historic view of professional black womanhood as linked to the success of the race, and the contemporary focus on marriage and family, more in line with the companionate ideal.

Drawing upon over three years of ethnographic observations and interviews with African-American married professional women and their families, I provide an overview of the African American model of partnership marriage in which black wives much greater labor force participation and tradition of community participation alongside motherhood normalized more egalitarian marital relationships. I demonstrate the importance of social mobility in creating a context in which some middle- class and upper-middle class black wives have opportunities to exercise choice in their work and family strategies. While these choices are often constrained, respondents demonstrate a move away from extended-kin and partnership marriage to a more traditional ideal of companionate marriage in which black women's labor force participation is less readily linked to racial advancement. By investing in and modeling a more modern marital form, African American professional mothers, utilizing strategic assimilation, resist and oppose contemporary stereotypes of African American families and seek to ensure their class advantages will be passed on to their children. The unique convergence of class, race, and gender as simultaneous constructs sets African American professional women and their families apart from white professional families, and poor and working class African American families. Consequently, my focus on strategies rooted in people's different cultural models expands the discourse on work/career and family conflict to include varied histories, interpretations and responses.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction: Black Women Have Always Worked .. 1 Chapter 2 Literature Review ... 59 Chapter 3 Race, Gender and Respectability in Atlanta's Professional Class 94 Chapter 4 Professional Black Wives and Middle Class Mobility .. 147 Chapter 5 Choices, Demands and Expectations . 192 Chapter 7 Conclusion .. 240 APPENDIX .. 248 BIBLIOGRAPHY .. 266

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Anthropology
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Anthropology, Cultural Women's Studies
Keyword	motherhood gender strategy racial identity Atlanta, GA black middle-class
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Shore, Bradd, Emory University
Committee Members	Barlett, Peggy F, Emory University Lacy, Karyn, University of Michigan

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