Black Women Beating the Odds From One Generation to the Next: How the Changing Dynamics of Constraint and Opportunity Affect the Process of Educational Resilience

Abstract

Relying on the life stories of three age cohorts of Black women who were first-generation college graduates, this article reveals how structural constraints shifted from one generation to another to differentially place the women at risk for limited educational attainment. In response to these shifting constraints and accordant changes in opportunities, the women’s strategies for negotiating the constraints on their educational mobility changed from one age cohort to the next in the production of educational resilience. These findings convey that the changing dynamics of social life must be accounted for in our efforts to improve the theoretical precision with which we understand educational resilience as a socio-historical and institutionally responsive process instead of as an individually determined phenomenon.