Ordinary poor black women practiced quotidian self-sacrifice to fund their church societies

Evidence

On Women’s Day, the president of a women’s mission band told her congregation that each member of her band had taxed herself a nickel monthly. A woman poultry-raiser testified that she set aside one of her hens and donated to her society all the money that was received from the sale of the hen’s eggs and chickens. Another woman described the sacrificial devotion of her family when illness made it difficult to respond to her society’s call for periodic contributions. Determined to meet the call, family members denied themselves sugar for a fixed amount of time. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 312

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: the micro-economics of self-denial—sugar foregone, hens set aside—as the physical infrastructure that underwrote a movement’s moral authority and institution building.
• XREF: Counters the assumption that 19th-century black women’s organizations were middle-class affairs; these are poor women’s sacrifices grounded in everyday household economy. — connects to: Poor Black women donated to white missions at real financial sacrifice — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 451; Black self-help movements actively inculcated mainstream bourgeois values into the poor — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 454; Black church women were central to the church’s public role as racial self-help — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 37 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Black mothers’ self-sacrifice was recast as negative stereotype #complicates (0.78)
• Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women #qualifies (0.76) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 727