Description:
This important and illuminating study explores the impact of economic, structural, and policy changes since the 1970s on the status and well-being of Black women in the U.S. It challenges the popular rhetoric about Black women's work experiences, economic status, and role in providing for and sustaining their families and communities.
Review Quotes:
"This book, edited by Nina Banks and Rhonda V. Sharpe, offers work that both scholars have long presented. They have refused to accept aggregate data that obscure what disaggregation makes plain, and a commitment to putting Black women at the center of the analysis rather than in a footnote. The result is a volume that addresses the question I raised fifty years ago and carries it forward with new data and new frameworks." -- Barbara A. P. Jones, Atlanta, Georgia
"The analyses provide important insights into the hard work put in by Black women to support their families and their communities. This work is particularly important at a time when the role of government in support of families and communities is being debated and revised. [...] This volume and its attention to both the needs and the contributions of Black women to their families and communities is essential to our understanding of the types of policies needed to advance Black women and the communities in which they live." -- Margaret C. Simms, co-editor of Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women
"Forty years ago, Margaret Simms and I edited Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women, documenting how Black women's contributions were discounted, their needs overlooked, and their status rendered invisible by categories-- "women" and "Blacks"--that obscured more than they revealed. The question then is the question now: What do we see when Black women are examined directly, disaggregated, in full? The answer is not simple progress. It is structural persistence across shifting domains. The chapters examine that persistence across immigration, entrepreneurship, incarceration, and electoral politics. In each arena, race and gender do not operate additively. They configure--what Kimberlé Crenshaw theorized as intersectionality." -- Julianne Malveaux, co-editor of Slipping Through the Cracks: The Status of Black Women