Thoughts on Talk With You Like a Woman

Hicks explores the lives and obstacles faced by black working-class and poor women living in early 20th century New York City. Focusing on the settlement houses, two prisons, and examining the Progressive-era reformists, Hicks elucidates the Victorian-rooted ideas of sexuality and femininity that lay at the root of the masculinization of black women and the attempts to regulate black women in the urban North. She also critiques the underlying racism of both white reformists and the black middle-class, which supports an elitist ideology of racial uplift predicated upon the moral inferiority of working-class blacks. These working-class and poor Negroes from the South must receive guidance and training to survive in the dangerous urban North, but also, blacks themselves are unprepared for city living because they are morally and culturally deficient. This presumed inferiority of black migrants of lower socioeconomic status was linked to patriarchal ideals of racial uplift and the politics of respectability, which attempted to challenge the lack of respect bestowed upon black women as ladies by embracing middle-class values extolled as virtuous among whites of the Victorian era. This required edifying lower-class blacks in proper sexual propriety, moral uplift, and patriarchal, heterosexual family units that would ensure an end to the presumed lasciviousness of black women and limit their criminal instincts. 

The cause of moral uplift and training for young black women was championed by black and white reformists and activists, such as Victoria Matthews, a black woman who opened settlement houses for young women, the White Rose Home. Others, such as Grace Campbell, an African-American probation officer and state worker, offered guidance to young black women coming out of Auburn and Bedford, two prisons disproportionately populated by black women. Social scientists and others, such as Frances Kellor and woman judge Jean Norris also participated in this elitist, top-down movement to improve the alleged inferiorities of African-Americans. Norris, for instance, sympathized with the plight of young black women coming from the South who found poverty, low-wage domestic service, sexual harassment, and crime, but was blind to the attitudes and activism of African-American. She assumed that blacks were not concerned with or active in protecting and inculcating the proper values in their female kin, turning a blind eye to community churches, institutions, and families struggling to protect and control these young women. Frances Kellor, a University of Chicago social scientist, also studied the effects of exploitative employment bureaus which lured young black women to the North, often leading to conditions conducive for crime because of low wages and the dangers of urban life. However, Kellor also blamed these young women’s predicament on themselves based on slavery’s alleged weakening of African-American’s moral fiber, resulting in a culturally inferior people unfit for urban life. Interestingly, while acknowledging the sexual predation of black women from white male employers, she still blames them for lacking virtue, believing in the Jezebel stereotype of black women.

Another fascinating part of the text is her analysis of the 1900 New York City race riot. She reveals the police’s discriminatory policies for charging black women for rapes. Black women in the streets, seen talking to men, or being in the street late at night were assumed to be soliciting, and police brutality recognized no gender differences in victims. The 1900 race riot engulfed the Tenderloin area of lower Manhattan in violence as a white mob indiscriminately attacked blacks after Arthur Harris killed a plainclothes police officer who struck his common-law wife, May Enoch, before attempting to arrest her for soliciting. Instead of seeing the race riot as a conflict of interracial masculinity, Hicks’s analysis reorients the riot to illuminating the vulnerability of black women to police brutality and violence in the urban North without depicting black women as solely victims. Working-class and poor black women reclaimed respectability and their own self-worth as first-class citizens after the riot regardless of the black elite and whites thought. Black women also embraced respectability while simultaneously expressing themselves as sexual beings, resisting state laws such as “wayward minor” statutes that allowed parents, legal guardians, and the police to arrest and incarcerate young women for parental disobedience and presumed deviance, and challenging the discriminatory labor practices that precluded them from other forms of employment via crime and theft.  

 Hicks also offers new insight onto older claims on the acceptance by lower-class blacks of homosexuality, or out-of-wedlock pregnancies. For instance, Mabel Hampton, a lesbian who was imprisoned for heterosexual soliciting, stated that all-women rent parties and lesbian scenes in 1920s Harlem were done in secret. Thus, despite the rather openly lesbian lyrics of songs such as Gertrude Ma Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues,” lesbians could not wear slacks in the streets en route to these parties because their same-sex desires would then be obvious to men. Furthermore, Hampton ended her career in dancing because men were always making sexual advances on women, and there were few bars and dance clubs where women could openly express their same-sex desire. Hence, Hicks concludes that lesbians were even less accepted in Harlem than gay men, regardless of socioeconomic status. Obviously, this has ramifications for scholarship on homophobia in black communities which has stated that historically, the black working-class was more accepting of non-heterosexual behavior than the middle-class of Harlem. Of course, one must engage in additional research before making such a broad claim, especially about generalizing black communities’ attitudes toward LGBT members of their neighborhoods. Indeed, some claim that since white police forces have allowed red-light districts to persist in some communities, particularly black neighborhoods, these state-sanctioned zones of vice would likely have included homosexual and heterosexual prostitution. Since black communities could not remove red-light districts in Harlem and other low-income black neighborhoods, residents had less power to monitor or eradicate sex workers, which presumably has made black communities more accepting of certain nontraditional sexual arrangements or relationships. 

             In truth, the reality probably lies closer to the middle of the two extremes. Hicks suggests that herself when emphasizing how black working-class families considered themselves respectable and owned up to their own mistakes and flaws, including criminal actions. Working-class and poor African American women, although deviating from the politics of respectability by expressing their sexuality and committing crimes, a “masculine” feat, also claimed respectability based on their self-respect and humanity. Their families also embraced it as well through an ambivalent relationship with the state’s attempts to regulate young black women. Moreover, Hicks complicates the binary of silence and open expressions of sexuality. Clearly, the “harmful intimacy” between black and white women in Bedford and Auburn prisons, the broader social contexts of lesbianism in New York City during this period, or black women’s willingness to defend themselves against police brutality or take advantage of their alleged lasciviousness to rob white men slumming in Tenderloin and Harlem, complicate the narrative of respectability among African-Americans. It was never solely embraced by the black middle-class, but the specific ways working-class and poor blacks chose to incorporate it into their communities could entail open expressions of black female identity that did not include silence or dissemblance, as the willingness of black women prisoners to reveal their experiences with sexual abuse shows. Hicks avoids making any firm separation between politics of respectability and the lived experiences of these women.