Laboring Black Women: Family, Fertility, and Work

Catalog description

Studies of fertility, the family, and women in the workforce are disproportionately focused on white middle-to-upper class women. In contrast, this course will center on the distinct experiences of Black women in the aforementioned realms. Divided into three parts, the first will concentrate on studies that address alarming trends regarding Black women and fertility: for example, Black women are more likely than non-Black women to struggle with conception yet less likely to seek medical intervention and their mortality rates during childbirth are significantly higher than whites. The second part of the course will focus on family and how Black girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood has been conceptualized throughout history. Additionally, we will study Black women’s encounters in dating, marriage, and with beauty in the US and internationally. The final portion of the course will examine Black women’s experiences in the workforce, across socioeconomic status. We will investigate how and why Black women dominate certain professions, such as the ownership of Black beauty salons (Wingfield 2008) and being caregivers (e.g. nurse, nanny). Readings for the course will include Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (2014) by Dorothy Roberts; Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood (2019) by Dawn Dow; and Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community (2015) by Riche Daniel Barnes. Throughout the course, we will rely on Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought, Kimberle Crenshaw’s Intersectionality, and Brittney Cooper’s Crunk Feminism as our theoretical frameworks.