Parlor ladies and ebony drudges

the long version

Focusing on the community of Orangeburg, South Carolina, from 1880 to 1940, Parlor Ladies and Ebony Drudges explores the often sharp class divisions that developed among African American women in that small, semirural area. Kibibi Voloria Mack's research challenges the conventional thesis that all African American women toiled - and toiled hard - throughout their lives. She shows that this was only true if they belonged to certain socioeconomic classes. Mack finds that, in Orangeburg, a significant minority did not have to work outside the home (unless they chose to do so) and that some even had staffs of domestics to do their housework - a situation paralleling that of the town's genteel white women. While the factors of gender and race did restrict the lives of all African American women in Jim Crow Orangeburg, Mack argues, there was no real solidarity across class lines. In fact, as the points out, tensions often arose between women of the upper classes and those of the middle and working classes.