Remaking Respectability

African American Women in Interwar Detroit

By: Victoria W. Wolcott

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Paperback | 17 September 2001

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Paperback
360 Pages

Edition Type
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Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 2.54

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How black women challenged and reshaped notions of respectable behavior for women and men; 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 served not just as models of bourgeois respectability, but 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.

Industry 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")

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You Can Find This Book In

Non-Fiction Society & Culture Social Groups Gender Studies Gender Studies: Women and Girls History Regional & National History History of the Americas Ethnic Studies Black & Asian Studies Reference, Information & Interdisciplinary Subjects Interdisciplinary Studies

General Studies Cultural Studies Earliest Times to Present Day 20th Century History from 1900 to 2000 Specific Events & Topics in History Social & Cultural History

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
Female Uplift Ideology, the Politics of Class, and Resettlement in Detroit	p. 11
Reform and Public Displays of Respectability in Great Migration Detroit	p. 49
The Informal Economy, Leisure Workers, and Economic Nationalism in the 1920s	p. 93
Neighborhood Expansion and the Decline of Bourgeois Respectability in the 1920s	p. 131
Economic Self-Help and Black Nationalism in the Great Depression	p. 167
Grassroots Activism, New Deal Policies, and the Transformation of African American Reform in the 1930s	p. 207
Conclusion	p. 241
Notes	p. 247
Bibliography	p. 303
Index	p. 331
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.

Remaking Respectability

African American Women in Interwar Detroit

At a Glance

Paperback

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

You Can Find This Book In

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