A01=Bart Landry
american families
Author_Bart Landry
black families
black women
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSL
Category=JHBK
domestic labor
dual career marriages
economics
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family
family structure
feminism
gender
gender roles
gender studies
gendered labor
history
households
housework
intersectionality
motherhood
nonfiction
politics
popular culture
public policy
race
sexuality and gender
sociology
traditional family
two income family
womanhood
women
womens movement
womens roles
womens work
working class
working mothers
working wives
working women
Product details
- ISBN 9780520236820
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Long before the 1970s and the feminist revolution that shattered traditional notions of the family, black women in America had already accomplished their own revolution. Bart Landry's groundbreaking study adds immeasurably to our accepted concepts of 'traditional' and 'new' families: Landry argues that black middle-class women in two-parent families were practicing an egalitarian lifestyle that was envisioned by few of their white counterparts until many decades later. The primary transformation of the American family, Landry says, took place when nineteenth-century industrialization brought about the separation of home and workplace. Only then did the family we call traditional, in which the husband goes out to work while the wife stays at home, become the centerpiece of white middle-class ideology. Black women, excluded from this model of respectability, embraced a threefold commitment to family, community, and career. They embodied the notion that employment outside the home was the route to more equality in the home, and that work was worth pursuing for reasons other than economic survival.
With a careful and convincing mix of biography, historical records, and demographic data, Landry shows how these black pioneers of the dual-career marriage created a paradigm for other women seeking to escape the cult of domesticity and thus foreshadowed the second great family transformation. If the two-parent nuclear family is to persist beyond the twentieth century, it may be because of what we can learn from these earlier women about an ideology of womanhood that combines the private and public spheres.
Bart Landry is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland and author of The New Black Middle Class (California, 1987).
