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Watching #SelfMadeNetflix as a historian who specializes in Black women in work/business/industry, specifically uncovering their struggles 4 economic justice I thought abt the texts/contexts that would have helped clarify the life of MCJW. I am starting #SelfMadeSyllabus. (1)
First up, Tera Hunter's To Joy My Freedom -- about Black women and work after the Civil War, and focuses on the lives and activism of washerwomen in the south, specifically Atlanta. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674893085 (2)
Second up, Deborah Gray White's Too Heavy A Load, is a classic in Black women's history and tells the history of Black women's organizations, including the National Association of Colored Women, https://books.google.com/books/about/Too_Heavy_a_Load.html?id=v6-fS190xuIC (3)
Thirdly, in Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, she lays out the "politics of respectability," which undergirded much of Black Christian women's activism
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674769786 (4)
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674769786 (4)
Fourthly, Darlene Clark Hine, Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women, a seminal work uncovering Black women's experiences of sexual violence and the strategies they used to protect themselves https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174692?seq=1 (5)
Next, Juliet E.K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race and Entrepreneurship provides an overview of Black business and situates people like MCJW in a broader context https://books.google.com/books?id=Y9C6AAAAIAAJ&q=history+of+black+business&dq=history+of+black+business&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjIueDMwLToAhU1ZDUKHeDcAA0Q6AEwAnoECAEQAg (6)
Also, Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present examines Black women and their labor struggles and triumphs over time https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/jacqueline-jones/labor-of-love-labor-of-sorrow/9780465018819/ (7)
Additionally, Julia Kirk Blackwelder's Stylin Jim Crow: African American Beauty Training During Segregation explores Black beauty education during the Jim Crow era https://www.amazon.com/Styling-Jim-Crow-American-Segregation/dp/1585442445 (8)
The list continues with Susannah Walker's Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_african_american_studies/48/ (9)
Not done yet, also Tiffany Gill's brilliant Beauty Shop Politics which explores Black women's beauty activism, nationally and internationally, including their organizational and professional efforts https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/86hdc8fp9780252035050.html (10)
Can't forget the biography of MCJW by A'Lelia Bundles, On Her Own Ground https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/On-Her-Own-Ground/ALelia-Bundles/9780743431729 (11)
