“Explicitly grounding my analysis in multiple voices highlights the diversity, richness, and power of Black women's ideas as part of a long-standing African American women's intellectual community. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.”īlack Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. in particular, Black women become less 'feminine,' because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children.įramed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. First, the assumed split between the 'public' sphere of paid employment and the 'private' sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not.

It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, 'normal' families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. “Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal.

Black feminist epistemology collins