Black Baptist women mobilized a politics of respectability as resistance to consumer capitalism.

Evidence

With the rise of department stores, mass advertising, and installment buying, commercialism’s impact was felt by all classes and races. Consuming passions and other materialistic values superseded older, nineteenth-century ideals of thrift and self-sacrifice. … The Baptist women were equally critical of furnishing homes with “fancy installment plan stuff.” Rather than “carpets of flaming hues, fancy clocks, lace curtains, plush furniture, brass beds,” homes needed “more of the old-fashioned comfort … clean walls, bare floors, a few rugs, and a good library with the best books and magazines.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 954

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The rejection of display goods in favor of a ‘good library’ nicely extends the dress/decorum angle of the immodesty article into household consumption.
• QUESTION: Is thrift/frugality an underemphasized third pillar of the politics of respectability alongside manners and sexual purity?
• XREF: connects to: Black Baptist women wielded respectability as a weapon against biological racism — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 882; Black Baptist women used prayer as a disguised discourse of political resistance — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1018; Early black women’s Baptist organizing deflected controversy by foregrounding domestic respectability themes. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 349 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Early black women’s Baptist organizing deflected controversy by foregrounding domestic respectability themes. #expands (0.85) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 349
• Black Baptist women’s activism worked gradually and subversively, not through dramatic revolt #expands (0.78) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 113
• Black Baptist women used prayer as a disguised discourse of political resistance #expands (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1018