Abstract
As I read, Cynthia Blair’s I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, I reflected on the history of black women’s labor in underground economies to provide for themselves and their families. My mind flipped between the past and present to think about how the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism were and are placed on black women both in and out of the sex marketplace. This book details black women’s experiences of institutional racism and sexism that made the sex industry an accessible and appealing occupation at the turn of the century in Chicago. In this groundbreaking book, Blair deftly documents how sex workers made radical moves by embracing their identities as black women who also exchanged sex for money.
Throughout the text are examples of the pressure that black women sex workers faced to conform to the “politics of respectability” (p. 87). Black women’s bodies were both racialized and hypersexualized, which also meant that non-sex working black women were assumed to be sex workers. Both black men and women thought that the visibility of women working in the sex market contributed to the sexual immorality stereotypes of all black folks. Through clippings of newspapers, clubhouse directories, guidebooks, and other documented archives, Blair provides examples of the rhetoric that was used to describe the physical and social location of black women in the sex market. Blair describes the multiple venues in which sex work took place and how, depending on the year, impact of antivice campaigns, or pressure from community members to rid prostitution from their neighborhoods, the sex economy shifted socially and locally.
Blair analyzes the description of roles, attitudes, spatial boundaries, and dominant gendered and racial discourses that shaped the sex industry in Chicago. Although “white middle-class and elite men and women frequently expressed discomfort at the spectacle of the racial and ethnic intermixture found in the Levee” (p. 55), black women often found creative ways to capitalize on the oppression that came with the “illicit desires” of white men. When black sex workers provided their services to white men, “the only domestic relation that black sex workers could reproduce for their white clients was not that of husband and dutiful wife, but, rather, that of master and obedient servant” (p. 67). With the assumption of these roles, black prostitutes were savvy in the strategies they used to gain financially under these oppressive ideologies.
Blair acknowledges the vast experiences, settings, and locations that defined an ever-shifting sex economy between the 1870s and 1930s. Indeed, she echoes the “ingenious adaptations” (p. 237) of black women at the intersections of race, sexuality, and the economy. I highly recommend this book to social workers and feminists at the individual, community, and academic levels. In our continuous efforts to cultural competence, learning the history of the communities to which we belong and work with is not only invaluable, it is essential to participating in anti-oppressive social work.