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RICHÉ DANIEL BARNES
Anthropology
Emory University
Project title: "Black Women Have Always Worked:
Constructions of Black Motherhood and the 'New' Black Middle Class"
This project asks how controlling myths and ideologies about black
women and black motherhood have been and are being refuted by black
mothers through the decision to stay at home or return to work following
childbirth. By contrasting the various postpartum decision-making
strategies of African American women, I propose that black women
choose to return to work or choose to stay at home with children
under the age of three in an effort to reconceptualize African American
womanhood, motherhood, and the construction and enactment of black
family life. While the African American family has been researched
and critiqued throughout most sociological, cultural, and political
scholarly generations, African American mothers have been largely
undertheorized outside the mass perception of matriarch, welfare
queen, and highly-sexed jezebel (imaged according to Patricia Hill
Collins [1991]), that have existed and persisted since American
slavery.
I will conduct the research using a cultural materialist/cultural
ecological model through which I will explore what cultural, ecological
and economic factors construct an environment in which staying at
home or going to work becomes a point of departure. I will examine
how the decision to stay at home or return to work is made considering
household decision-making strategies and gender identity construction.
More specifically, testing the extent to which these factors and
decisions impact the black community in a particularly distinctive
way, I will examine the myths and self-perceptions of four groups
of partnered/married women - black middle class working moms, black
middle class stay-at-home moms, white middle class working moms
and white middle class stay-at-home moms.
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