ABSTRACT
Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions. Work might be better conceptualized by examining the range of work that African-American women actually perform. Exploitative wages that Black women were allowed to keep and use for their own benefit or labor done out of love for the members of one’s family can present such work. For African women enslaved in the United States, these basic ideas concerning work, family, and motherhood were retained, yet changed by various fundamental demands of enslavement. In prior eras, African-American women’s relegation to agricultural and domestic work more uniformly structured Black women’s oppression as “mules uh de world.” For the vast majority of African-American women, urbanization meant migration out of agricultural work and into domestic work. Increased access to managerial and professional positions enabled sizable numbers of African-American women to move into the middle class in the post–Second World War political economy.
