ABSTRACT
For most of the twentieth century, black women were far more likely to be in the waged labor force than their white counterparts. Most were confined to domestic work and other poorly paid, marginal jobs. The obstacles to union organizing were enormous, particularly in domestic work, where employment was highly unstable and decentralized. In addition, until the 1930s, most unions took little interest in the plight of black women, who were subject to both race and sex prejudice within the labor movement as well as in society. Yet, as Rosalyn Terborg-Penn shows in this chapter, black women workers continually attempted to organize themselves into unions and union-like associations. Drawing upon traditional African mutual aid and collective survival strategies, black women built labor associations even in the most 'unorganizable' of occupations, although many of these efforts proved shortlived. Terborg-Penn sheds new light on this history with her emphasis on the threads of continuity between ancestral African female traditions of mutual support and the self-organization of black women in the twentieth-century USA.
