Care in Crisis: Black Women and the Politics of Labor in Atlanta, 1968-1982
Creators: name: Sherley, Eshe
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2023
Subjects: subject: Black Women's History
subject: Labor History
subject: Atlanta
subject: Care Work
subject: Civil Rights Movement
subject: African-American Studies
subject: History (General)
subject: Women's and Gender Studies
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities

description: This dissertation explores the organizing of working-class and poor Black women in Atlanta from 1968 to 1982. Previous histories of Black politics and the civil rights movement in Atlanta have focused on the political visions of elite and upwardly mobile Black Atlantans. In contrast, this project centers the Black feminist vision of care developed by working-class and poor Black women organizers in the city. This vision of care emerged from these women’s personal experiences and labor in different sectors of Atlanta’s service economy. Feminist historians have historically studied Black women’s organizing around care work by industry through the robust literatures on domestic worker rights, welfare rights, and tenants’ rights movements. However, this project’s focus on Atlanta reveals that the women involved in these separate national movements constituted a network of activists that developed a broader Black feminist vision of care that connected the tactics, concerns, analyses, and resources of the welfare rights, domestic worker rights, and tenants’ rights movements at the local level. Through an analysis of diverse archival sources, including government records, prison records, the personal records of activists and politicians, oral histories, newspapers, and materials from social movement organizations, this dissertation demonstrates the influence of this network of working poor Black women organizers on the urban politics of Atlanta. In this way, this project builds upon Black feminist labor histories of the South and the political histories of Atlanta. Black feminist historians have shown how Black women’s labor was used to construct the symbolic and economic foundation of the early 20th-century New South. Extending this line of inquiry, this dissertation reveals how the coercion of Black women’s care work continued as the New South was remade again in the 1960s and 1970s during the long civil rights movement. While political historians have centered middle-class Black men in the rise of Black electoral power in Atlanta, this dissertation reveals that working poor Black women parlayed their economic and social centrality to everyday life in Atlanta into a pivotal place in the city’s politics in the 1970s. This dissertation analyzes this political history through the lens of social reproduction theory, which demonstrates the role that the unpaid and undervalued labor of renewing life enables a productive capitalist economy. The feminist framework of social reproduction reveals that Black women’s social movement organizing should be understood as an intervention into the fundamental dynamics of the U.S. political economy, and therefore part of the history of capitalism. This dissertation argues that Black women organizers were not simply victims of state divestment from care provision and social welfare in the 1970s and early 1980s. Rather, my analysis of the network’s organizing proves that working poor Black women developed a Black feminist politics of social reproduction through rent strikes, union building, and direct actions across Atlanta that challenged the economic dynamics that kept their communities in poverty and confronted urban policies that sacrificed their needs on the altar of austerity and urban growth. This dissertation also uses the political analysis of these care work organizers to rethink feminist theories of political economy, proposing that a Black feminist approach to social reproduction theory is needed to fully capture Black women’s experiences in U.S. economic life.