Beyond Respectability

The thinking of African American women has recently become a significant topic of academic study, often in the context of noteworthy male figures such as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin. Much of this new scholarship came in response to the work of an earlier generation (including Hazel Carby and Darlene Clark Hine) on what became known as race women. Beyond Respectability is the latest of these studies, focusing on the ways black women of the post-Reconstruction era and later generations pushed to transcend the ideology of respectability, which sought to regulate their behavior as a means of breaking down racial stereotypes and making the case for equality. Crucial to that regulation was the restriction of women to the domestic sphere and to middle-class standards of behavior. Brittney C. Cooper argues that these women did not repudiate the ideology but rather negotiated a balance between adherence to social conventions and the urgent need for public discussion of and action on the intersection of race and gender

Affirmative action · Context (archaeology · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Race (biology · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society