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Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis

Online ISBN:
9780813173924
Print ISBN:
9780813168838
Publisher:
University Press of Kentucky
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Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis

Keona K. Ervin
Keona K. Ervin
University of Missouri-Columbia
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Published:
7 July 2017
Online ISBN:
9780813173924
Print ISBN:
9780813168838
Publisher:
University Press of Kentucky

Abstract

Gateway to Equality demonstrates that from the 1930s to the 1960s, a critical mass of black working-class women forged a most expansive social justice struggle for economic dignity in St. Louis. Women mobilized and resisted as they sought jobs, a living wage, decent working conditions, affordable housing, and economic projection. Their community-based economic politics drew public attention to their status as key members of the urban working class and disrupted mainstream conceptualizations such as “worker,” “the working class,” and “the labor movement.” With support from black middle-class women reformers, black working-class women summoned the broader public sphere to embrace concern and responsibility for black women’s survival Merging women’s rights, labor, and civil rights agendas, black working-class women forged struggles that challenged and disrupted political discourses and practices as they questioned the role of the state, the limits and possibilities of American citizenship and democracy, and the reach and uses of economic power.

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