The politics of respectability worked within existing jobs by professionalizing them, not escaping them.

Evidence

Professionalizing domestic servants epitomized the Baptist women’s politics of respectability, since it constituted an effort to re-define and re-present black women’s work identities as skilled workers rather than incompetent menials. … Unlike educators who challenged the Talented Tenth to aspire to high-status professions in spite of racism and economic hardship, Burroughs entreated women in low-status jobs to perform with skill and efficiency. The Training School taught women to do “ordinary things in an extraordinary way.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 964

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely instantiates the coined politics of respectability as re-presentation of identity through skill rather than demand for exit from low-status work.
• XREF: Contrasts with Du Bois’s Talented Tenth route of aspiring to high-status professions, a parallel relevant to respectability debates. — connects to: Respectability politics converted menial work into skilled identity rather than merely outward manners — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 964; The respectability campaign rhetorically elevated working-class domestic servants as race exemplars — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 997

Broader Connections

• Respectability politics converted menial work into skilled identity rather than merely outward manners #expands (0.90) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 964
• The respectability campaign rhetorically elevated working-class domestic servants as race exemplars #exemplifies (0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 997