Remaking respectability: African-American women and the politics of identity in interwar Detroit.

Abstract

This dissertation traces the ways in which African-American women in Detroit negotiated community and individual identity from the Great Migration through the Great Depression. Divergent notions of appropriate behavior and deportment shaped the actions and interactions of elite and working-class African-American women during this period. Respectability, in particular, was a language and set of practices that had different meanings for different groups of women as African-Americans moved to Northern cities during the Great Migration. During the 1910s and 1920s Detroit's African-American reformers relied on images of "respectable" women to promote a community identity through public displays of "proper" dress and deportment. Meanwhile, individual female migrants engaged in activities that crossed lines of "rough" and "respectable" as they negotiated an urban terrain of saloons, disorderly houses and dance halls as well as settlement houses, churches and training centers. By the 1930s, dominate notions of African-Americans were "remade" as reformers focused less on religious and moral codes based on female respectability, and more on the employment of African-American men, youth delinquency, and the struggle for civil rights. In most narratives of the Great Migration, the African-American male industrial worker has been the central protagonist. Contemporaries of that migration, however, viewed female migrants as "seeds" of a new Northern community, carrying morality, education, and religiosity to the homes that would form the center of African-American urban neighborhoods. This dissertation rewrites early twentieth-century African-American history by placing women at the center of the story of migration and the growth of new urban African-American communities. In the field of women's history, the story of African-American women has not focused on the crucial inter-war period when reformers and migrants struggled with the relationship between gender roles, and community building. Thus, this dissertation fills a major lacuna in both African-American and Women's history by tracing the movement of southern African-American women to Detroit, and examining how a reform discourse of female respectability shaped the institutional responses to the Great Migration.