This article reflects upon the contributions and limits of Joe William Trotter Jr.'s Black Milwaukee by revisiting the book's proletarianization model. This model helped to complicate analyses and historical narratives of black urban experiences by departing from “ghetto”-based paradigms and focusing squarely on economy, class relations, and black people as laborers. But the model also proved limited, particularly as it related to the substantive versus “snapshot” incorporation of women's stories and gender analysis.
Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee : The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 275. For a rich discussion of Trotter's critique of the ghetto synthesis, spatial, race relations models, see his Appendix 7, 264-82.
2.
Ibid., xi.
3.
Ibid., 138.
4.
Quotes appear in ibid., pp. 275 and 264, respectively.
5.
Ibid., 276.
6.
Ibid., 66.
7.
Quotes appear in ibid., pp. 46 and 66, respectively.
8.
Trotter's index reflects his incorporation of women throughout the book. See, for instance, individual women's names as well as subject entries such as “Woman's Improvement Club,” “Women,” and “Young Women's Christian Association,” in ibid., 301.
9.
Jacqueline Jones's book, which squarely focused on black women's work, was published in 1985, the same year as Trotter's study. Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Also see the 1980s studies cited in note 17 below.
10.
Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 59-60. Also see p. 159.
11.
Ibid., 47, 66, 159, 171-74.
12.
Ibid., 158-59. For studies that specifically explore the race and gender implications and stratification of social policy, see, for instance, Linda Gordon, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). For examinations of black women's relationships to urban policy, the government, and social programs as well as their responses to them in cities, see, for instance, Lisa Marie Levenstein, “The Gendered Roots of Modern Urban Poverty: Poor Women and Public Institutions in Post-World War II Philadelphia,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin—Madison, 2002); Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2005); Nancy A. Naples, Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty (New York: Routledge, 1998); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar's Palace: Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon, 2005); and Rhonda Y. Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
13.
See, for instance, Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 29-30, 32.
14.
Ibid., 83, 86, 93-96. See statistical tables that provide data on sex ratios in various occupational categories, ibid., 82, 84-85, 88-89, 94-95.
15.
James O. Horton , Review of Black Milwaukee, Journal of Social History20 (Winter 1986): 388-89.
16.
Trotter, Black Milwaukee, 171.
17.
For a sampling, see contemporary 1980s studies in northern and southern cities, such as Karen Tucker Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers During World War II,” Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 82-97; Dolores E. Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Beverly W. Jones, “Race. Sex. And Class: Black Female Tobacco Workers in Durham, North Carolina, 1920-1940, and the Development of Female Consciousness,” Feminist Studies 10 (Fall 1984): 441-51; and Ula Yvetter Taylor, “From White Kitchens to White Factories: The Impact of World War I on African-American Working Women in Chicago,” UFAHAMU 14 (1985), 5-50.
18.
Spencer Crew , Review of Black Milwaukee, Journal of American History74 (September 1987): 543-44.
19.
A recent article in the Radical History Review may prove thought provoking here. See John T. Chalcraft, “Pluralizing Capital, Challenging Eurocentricism: Toward Post-Marxist Historiography,” Radical History Review91 (Winter 2005): 13-39.
20.
Since the publication of Black Milwaukee, several books focusing on black women and how their working-class labor have shaped urban space, work, politics, and culture have been published. For instance, see Tera W. Hunter's work on domestic laborers and laundry workers in Atlanta. “ Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta,” Labor History34 (Spring/Summer 1993): 205-20; and Tera W. Hunter, To `Joy My Freedom': Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press , 1997).
