jacqueline jones labor of love labor of sorrow

Labor-force statistics contextualize discussions of individual women and the contours of their workdays inside and outside the home, and their labors waged and unwaged. At the same time I have preserved the essential features of the original text-attention to the nation’s political economy and changes in the social division of labor over time, enhanced by stories about the struggles of individual women and their families. Though this expanded bibliography is by no means exhaustive, it does offer the student a place to begin for research on the history of black women, work, and the family. A couple hundred of these citations are new to this edition. The bibliography now includes over one thousand citations gleaned from manuscript collections and other unpublished materials, magazines and newspapers, books, government reports, and scholarly essays. Expanding the epilogue to include the Robinsons seemed to be a fitting way to highlight the crosscurrents of historical transformation and continuity from the antebellum period to the present.įor obvious reasons I found these suggestions for a minimal set of revisions appealing, but in the end I decided to overhaul the book in a more thorough way. By the late twentieth century, Robinson Obama had graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and was working in a series of high-powered jobs as an attorney. Her great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson, an enslaved rice hand, was born in the South Carolina low country in 1850, a time and place discussed in Chapter 1.

Of course the emergence of one particular black working wife and mother onto the public stage in late 2008 suggested the urgent need for an update the family history of First Lady Michelle Robinson Obama, and the narrative of her life, would provide a fitting coda to the book, a way to survey the grand sweep of African American history over the last century and a half. Overall, the book’s argument-the profound tension between black women’s work for whites and the work they performed for their own families and communities-had withstood the test of time, classroom use, and reviewers.

They pointed out, correctly, that so much had been written on the history of black working women since the book was first published it would be virtually impossible to incorporate all of that new scholarship into a revised edition. Almost without exception they suggested that I add a new preface, and extend the epilogue to the present, leaving the rest of the chapters intact. Soon after I learned that Basic Books intended to reissue Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition, a number of friends, colleagues, and family members offered me advice (admittedly, most of it solicited) on revising the original text.

Jacqueline jones labor of love labor of sorrow