Introduction  

The Kathleen Canning article on the place of the body in gender history situates the body as social bodies, sites of resistance, experience, nation, identity, race, class, etc..  The international scope of the Journal of Women’s History is apparent as the articles cover topics across cultures, race, revolutions, and economic differences.  My research interests led me towards looking at how a history of the Black body was treated within the Journal of Women’s History.  The Journal of Women’s History is unique in its international canon, which looks beyond the Americanized scope of women’s history.  Seeing that this journal takes a transnational frame I was very interested in seeing how the history of the Black racialized/colonialized body theorized within this journal and changed through recent years.  For this paper I reviewed the issues of this journal from 2010 to 2013 to take a look at how the Journal of Women’s History approached the topic of the Black body as it is formed through work/labor and welfare. 

 When I first began to read a number of the articles from the journal I could see that Black women’s bodies were theorized across a number of themes: slavery, temporality, property, law, the state, revolutions, reproduction, marriage, religion, accessibility, labor, as well as social contracts.  I found myself consistently having to refashion and critique my understandings of what is considered ‘the body’ and how ‘the body’ is theorized and how knowledge about the body is produced and has been produced historically.  Throughout history, women’s bodies have often been landscapes of the state, where government offices and social institutions created boundaries of respectability, citizenship, and the future of the nation-state.  Bodies are not simply sites of inscription but also sites of production, knowledge production in many cases.  A number of the articles in the Journal of Women’s history highlighted the Black woman’s body as not simply a site of painful experience, but also agency, resistance, and social production.  The Black woman’s body is riddled with contradictions (e.g. hyper-sexualized and desexualized) the ultimate other in a society that defines human as White and male. The Journal of Women’s history’s issues from 2010 to 2013 had a total of three articles that covered the topic of the Black body in relation to work/labor and welfare.  Two articles covered access and labor in relation to the Black body and one article discussed the Black body and welfare. 

Social Exclusion & Labor/Work  

In Jan Wilson’s article “Disunity in Diversity: The Controversy Over the Admission of Black Women to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), 1900–1902”, Wilson covers an interesting story that says a lot about the meaning of the Black body when she discusses a short story that the General Federation of Women’s Clubs printed that talked about how a club woman who encouraged the marriage of her blond haired daughter to another club woman’s son and the other club woman’s family happened to have a drop or two of negro blood.  The story ends with the newlyweds giving birth to a baby two years later who is described as having jet black skin and the mother dies instantly upon seeing her Black child.  The imagery of this story is a telling social trope that perpetuates some of the ideologies of the GFWC during the early 20thcentury.  This short story was a part of a debate among the members of the GFWC and reflected the social meaning of the Black body, in the case of this story, the sight of a bearing a Black child induced death via horror and shock.  The GFWC had a goal of uniting women to work towards individual and social improvement.  While the GFWC stated that they wanted to unite in diversity, they did not mean Black women.  Black women were considered sites of work for White women of the GFWC.  Black women were considered recipients of their good Christian work of the club women.  In this article Black bodies were sites where superiority of Whiteness was proven, Black bodies were political and social problems materialized.  Ultimately the GFWC decided that the presence of Black women in the club would expose them to the dangers of social and evolutionary inferiority.  Black women, while working for White women were sites of charity.  The Black woman was not allowed to extract any benefits from her own labor power, partially because the Black woman’s social body was a site to be extracted from, exploited, but not valued outside of the use and exchange value in a White only market (socially, politically, and economically).  

 Robin Muhammad’s “Separate and Unsanitary: African American Women Railroad Car Cleaners and the Women’s Service Section, 1918–1920” covers the struggle of how Black women railroad car sanitation workers managed to get the Women’s service section (WSS) to include desegregation into their campaign goals. This article was interesting and struck a number of similarities with the Kathleen Brown book “Foul Bodies” that we read earlier this semester.  The Black women who worked on the railroad cars could not use the toilets, locker rooms, or dining facilities that White used and no facilities existed outside of the ones for Whites on the rail cars.  Racial segregation is an interesting historical site where racial boundaries were reified and remade the meaning of non-White bodies on a continual basis.  In this article a history of the black body was highlighted, one of liberation.  During World War I the federal government’s control of the railroads did get a number of different labor issues addressed but not women’s labor issues and especially not Black women.  Black women’s agency turned into a significant win for the women’s labor movement. This is not the first time this has occurred in American history, Black women’s bodies have been the site of resistance and social movements partially defined by their work and the suffering of their bodies but that the Black woman’s social body always manages to benefit groups beyond them.  Muhammad discusses how these Black women took the opportunity to remake the meaning of the Black body in order to gain equal access to industrial employment, within their work to demand desegregation these Black women helped redefine the meaning of the “new Negro”.  Black bodies, Black labor, Black resistance began to move the meaning of the Black social body from a site of helplessness and inferiority to a visible site of resistance and agency.   The GFWC’s diversity war amongst their club members to fight to keep the ‘diseased’ Blacks out of their women’s clubs from 1900 to 1902, where two to three drops of Black blood could produce a Black tar baby that killed with shock and horror became a Black body that was a critically organized labor tactic that could improve the labor conditions of White women as well by 1918.  The social body of Black women is filled with the contradictions and illogical fallacies of racism and patriarchy, while also remaining a body that is capable of providing liberation to White women within American capitalism.  While the value of Black labor was to be extracted by White Americans, the Black body could never fully benefit from its own work whether that be economic, political, or social 

Welfare  

Rickie Solinger’s “The First Welfare Case: Money, Sex, Marriage, and White Supremacy in Selma, 1966, A Reproductive Justice Analysis” reviews the King v. Smith 1966 welfare case in Selma, Alabama that attempted to showcase the sexual deviancy and reproductive capacity of poor Black women in an attempt to demonstrate that they were inferior and unprepared for civil rights and full citizenship.  In this article the Black body challenges the meanings of citizenship as the racial boundaries become more and more blurred after the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1965.  White backlash ensued in many ways and the legal grounds was one arena where White supremacists made their best attempts to reify the meanings of Black bodies.  

 King vs Smith was the first welfare case ever heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. In this case the bodies of Black women were under surveillance by the state in an attempt to literally regulate their reproductive capacity.  Black women’s bodies were used to design policies that reiterated a Black social body that was irresponsible: socially, sexually, fiscally, etc..  White policy makers in Selma were attempting to make sexual pleasure a class-race privilege by further degrading the sexual habits of Black women as an attempt to diminish the importance of Black marriage. Politicians in Selma reflected their racial and class social contracts for the welfare state since its creation in 1935 by ensuring that Blacks were excluded from the welfare benefits based upon the belief that only White women should have the luxury of staying home and caring for the children and the home while the men went to work.  Such a leisure was thought of as something that should be a White only privilege.  This sexual surveillance and social exclusion assisted the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) office in crafting the controlling image of the welfare queen.  These images were deliberately crafted through surveillance and the careful social inscription of White supremacist ideals upon poor Black bodies in Selma from the 1940s to the 1960s.  A state policing of the Black body ensued.  Generally the historical scholarship on welfare reform solely focuses on the damage that the Reagan era presidency did to the welfare system to exclude women of color from receiving and/or keeping benefits.  But when a history of the Black body is inquired, welfare programs were being policed at their inception and the meaning of Black bodies were being socially produced through the social contracts of capitalism, patriarchy, and White supremacy to solidify the preferred social borders, in an attempt to maintain the social order that had existed in Selma, Alabama (and elsewhere) prior to the Civil Rights Movement.  

 Strategic moves were taken to continue to maintain the social exclusion of Blacks in Selma from gaining any economic progress.  White politicians worked hard to maintain all White staff in government jobs also in an attempt to bar any Blacks from using those employment opportunities to further pursue civil rights and citizenship.  This was another part of their attempt to keep Blacks in Selma, Alabama where they belonged, at the bottom of the social, economic, and political barrel.  While the social bodies of Blacks were being re-made, socially produced in a manner of political resistance, new racial boundaries were being inscribed upon Black bodies for the purposes of maintaining intersectional societal and economic exclusion. This was a well-rounded attempt to try to eliminate the earning power of Black bodies as well as dismantling the Black family. White employers achieved this initiative by paying Black employees with everything except money: hand me down clothing, food, and housing.  It was an upgraded version of sharecropping.  

Conclusion  

As a researcher, my interests lie in studying the racialization as the social processes involved in identity formulation, the making of the other, the making of Blackness.  The work/labor of Black bodies is extremely important in a capitalist world.  Through a canon of the work/labor, the history of the Black body has so many meanings. Via capitalism, Black bodies were made into a very specific type of commodity, a commodity that required the creation and maintenance of an ideological system in order for its use-value and exchange-value to increase.  What new articulations and understandings of the racialization process of Black bodies can be articulated by looking at how Black bodies navigated the labor force, unions, women’s clubs, and the American ‘justice’ system?  Omi and Winant’s understandings of racialization and racism as projects point out that race/racism are ongoing processes. Through these processes social bodies are exchanged for different meanings.  Racialization dictates the value of Black work, Black bodies, Black spaces, & White responses (e.g. employment, murder, health disparity, professionalism, etc.).  A different understanding of racialization and capitalism could be articulated through a history of the body that looks at two cornerstones of capitalist societies: the resistance of the Black worker and the backlash of the dominant White supremacist systems.  

The Journal of Women’s History’s articles from 2010 to 2013 showed a history of the Black body that provided a unique lens on the process of racialization and the making of the Black social body. Economic, social, and political values were being inscribed upon Black bodies while Black bodies were also sites of liberation, possibility for women’s rights movements, and possibility for poor peoples’ movements.  By using the body as method to view the history of the Black body in labor and welfare we see a more complex conversation is to be had about these topics. Recent work on welfare and the significance of Black labor have not utilized a history of the body.  My previous understanding of the functions of public welfare and how it was drastically scaled down during the Raegan era lacked an understanding of how the business sector and labor tied into the intricate politics of these movements to pay workers less while articulating their state of poverty as a result of their own personal pathology.  This victim blaming ideology doubles when Black bodies are taken into consideration.  Black men make 77 cents on the White male dollar and Black women make 65 cents on the White male dollar.  The value of Black work/labor and how Black bodies are perceived in welfare and welfare reform have highlighted a new lens through which racialization is done, through which values are inscribed, a site where devaluation and dehumanization occurs. It is more than Black skin, it is Black blood, Black bodies as parts and wholes.  After reading these research articles, after looking at this topic through a lens of the history of the Black body the statistical trends, the job strikes we have been seeing, as well as the obvious fear that many workers have of forming unions can be seen in a new light.  Bodies can be landscapes, sites where the materiality of the deconstruction of the status quo can be located.  For instance, Walmart has policies and tactics to identify, reduce, and eliminate employees who demonstrate counter hegemonic behavior in regards to justice for worker’s rights.  Having a historical understanding of how the American society has gotten to this point brings about clarity in regards to this situation as well as revealing the inner workings of capitalism and racism as the contested value of the Black worker is constantly remade.  

Before reading Canning’s piece on the body as method, before reading Duden, and Brown my view on history and its social, economic, and political components was narrow, and in some ways linear.  Through some of the readings in this class and through the perspectives that the articles in the Journal of Women’s history has taken I am coming to understand that meaning is be constructed and deconstructed elsewhere.  The Journal of Women’s history’s has treated the Black body in relation to labor and welfare in an interesting manner.  The articles that were in the journal from 2010 to 2013 provide a new possibility in understanding the process of racialization as well as understanding social production in American society. 

Bibliography

Canning, K. 1999.  The Body as Method?: Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History. Gender and History. 11(3): 499-513.

Muhammad, R. 2011. Separate and Unsanitary: African American Women Railroad Car Cleaners and the Women’s Service Section, 1918–1920. 23(2): 87-111.

Solinger, R. 2010. The First Welfare Case: Money, Sex, Marriage, and White Supremacy in Selma, 1966, A Reproductive Justice Analysis. Journal of Women’s History. 22(3): 13-38.

Wilson, J. 2011. Disunity in Diversity: The Controversy Over the Admission of Black Women to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 1900–1902. Journal of Women’s History. 23(2): 39-63.