In Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit, Victoria W. Wolcott argues, “Understanding the variety of female experiences represented in [Robert] Hayden’s poem, [‘Elegies for Paradise Valley,’] is essential to understanding a broader story of African American life in the urban North” (pg. 2). Her “gender analysis reveals a significant transformation in racial discourse from a focus on bourgeois respectability in the 1910s and 1920s to a more masculine ideology of self-determination during the Great Depression” (pg. 2). Wolcott works to complicate the “dominant narrative of black Detroit” that focuses “on male industrial employment and struggles for civil rights,” largely overlooking women’s experiences and vital role in black Detroit (pg. 10).
Wolcott argues that turn of the century reformers linked bourgeois notions of respectability to racial uplift. She writes, “Through the discourse of household training, then, respectability was firmly linked with the physical cleanliness of homes and bodies…For all African American women, the presentation of clean homes and bodies could refute white stereotypes of black disorder and dirt and thus aid in the uplift of the race” (pg. 27). Reformers further worked to help new arrivals from the Great Migration to find respectable work. Wolcott argues, “Opening up employment for black women was intricately linked to the larger project of racial uplift” (pg. 50). Despite this, reformers often went along with employers colorism and preference for fair-skinned employees as they believed “some improvement in the labor market for African American women was better than no improvement at all” (pg. 77).
The informal economy challenged the simply dichotomy of respectable and illicit work. Wolcott writes, “Wages of prostitutes also made their way into family economies and community institutions such as churches. These women had achieved some level of social mobility and did not necessarily view themselves as failures. In the minds of African American elites, however, the presence and visibility of prostitutes stymied efforts at racial uplift and the creation of a respectable community identity” (pg. 113). According to Wolcott, the case against Ossian Sweet and his family, who defended their home from whites who wanted to maintain white control over a neighborhood, further illustrates the changing nature of respectability. The case combined “a racial uplift ideology that emphasized female respectability and racial integration and an ideology of racial self-determination that emphasized masculine rights to citizenship and self-defense. The wide-scale support and interest that the trial engendered in the African American community reflected the power of these overlapping discourses” (pg. 148-149).
During the 1930s, Wolcott writes, the “shift toward masculine images can be ascribed to the impact of male unemployment on the role of breadwinner. Because men no longer necessarily provided for their families, their ability to protect their families became paramount” (pg. 168). In this period, “Male unemployment, the growth of religious sects [such as the Nation of Islam], and the acceptance of numbers bankers in the ranks of the respectable all eroded a community identity based on self-restrain, decorum, and religiosity. A major symptom of this shift was the emergence of a masculine language of self-defense and self-determination” (pg. 204-205). Examining the Great Depression, Wolcott writes, “By the late 1930s, African American women throughout Detroit worked in union auxiliaries and marched in picket lines to demand representation from the industries that had exploited their husbands, sons, and fathers since the Great Migration. Increasingly, these women also demanded equal access to resources from city, state, and federal agencies” (pg. 216). Wolcott continues, “The experience of working with federal and state agencies during the Great Depression was invaluable to African American activists in the civil rights struggles of the 1940s, the 1950s, and beyond” (pg. 239). Wolcott concludes, “Understanding female respectability’s different valences gives us insight into intracommunity debates over social roles, forms of leisure, and political strategies. These dialogues are only heard when African American women’s experiences are fully incorporated into the narrative of migration and resettlement” (pg. 245-246). ( )