Career options available to black working-class Southern girls were marriage, maid work, or teaching

Evidence

Since everyone around me believed that I should be relieved, thrilled, proud, I felt “guilty” about my “real” feelings and could not share them with anyone. … When I shared my feelings with my sister (she’s a therapist), she reassured me that they were entirely appropriate because, she said, “You never wanted to be a teacher. Since we were little, all you ever wanted to do was write.” She was right. It was always assumed by everyone else that I would become a teacher. In the apartheid South, black girls from working-class backgrounds had three career choices. We could marry. We could work as maids. We could become school teachers. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 9

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the editor’s own work on structural constraint and narrowing of women’s life paths, echoing themes from A Midwife’s Tale-style accounts of circumscribed female vocation. — connects to: For Black working-class Southern girls, intelligence meant a forced teaching career — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 9
• SEED: An essay angle: how the funneling of a demographic into a few ‘respectable’ careers both oppresses and builds counter-hegemonic institutions, as with the segregated schoolteachers who educated hooks.
• DEFINE: Defines the material context of the apartheid South’s career funnel that shapes hooks’s ambivalent relation to teaching.

Broader Connections

• For Black working-class Southern girls, intelligence meant a forced teaching career #qualifies (0.82) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 9