Black women teachers endured severe pay discrimination and extra labor

Evidence

In the field of teaching, black women found respectable, relatively well-paying employment despite a job market that generally denied equal access to blacks and to women. Jacqueline Jones argues that teaching carried with it an implicit form of “social and political activism,” since its goal of endowing blacks with literacy and other skills for social advancement defied the racial caste intentions of the New South order. Black women teachers, motivated by racial consciousness and commitment to their local communities, served as a counterweight to crude school facilities, the poverty of their students, the shortened school year, and white hostility. They labored under harsh conditions, not least of which was an inequitable pay scale. Their teaching salaries averaged less than half of those of white male teachers, and less than those of white women and black men as well. For some black women teachers, the end of the school term marked not vacation, but employment as laundresses and seamstresses in order to make ends meet. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 222

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader work on respectability politics — teaching as respectable employment is the concrete economic base of the politics of respectability. — connects to: A Southern black woman in 1885 successfully challenged a male teacher’s promotion over her — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 581; Black women experienced sexist oppression distinct from racism — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 47; Jim Crow era labor discrimination forced black workers into unbenefited sectors — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 9 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Workplace wage discrimination against black women took three distinct structural forms. #expands (0.85) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 399
• Jim Crow era labor discrimination forced black workers into unbenefited sectors #expands (0.78) — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 9
• Black women experienced sexist oppression distinct from racism #qualifies (0.72) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 47