Leith Mullings Book Report

The Author of this book (On our own terms: race, class, and gender in the lives of African American Women) Leith Mullings seeks to explore the modern and historical lives of African American women on the issues of race, class and gender. Mullings does this in a very analytical way using a collection of essays written and collected over a twenty five year period. The author’s systematic format best explains her point of view. The book explores issues such as family, work and health comparing and contrasting between white and black women as well as between men and women of both races.

The book is set into three parts:-
• Part one- “women, work and community”
• Part two- “kin and family”
• Part three- “representation, resistance and
transformation: Theory and practice in Politics and the Academy.

There is also a preface and an introduction which exactly explains the author’s purpose for writing the book and how she plans too complete the task.

“articles represent an attempt, within the context of the academy

and the academic endeavour, to illuminate the experiences of African American women and to theorize from the materiality of their lives to broader issues of political economy, family, representation and transformation” (Mullings, page xi)

“I tried to demonstrate how both the cross cultural literature and the history of African American women gave the lie to the nation that gender inequality can be attributed to biological differences” (Mullings, page xvii)

Mullings early chapters discuss the importance of considering the differences between races and gender and how this affects women within work, family and community.

One of Mullings findings in her book is the fact that African American Women as a whole have always worked, unlike a lot of their white counter parts. Mullings gives a lot of examples of why this phenomenon exists. For example, she tells us that during reconstruction if a African American Women did not work she was taxed or forced to pay more rent, it has always it seems been a matter of forced labour in one way or another.

Mullings also points out that America is a very profit orientated nation. African Americans were socially devalued as well as women of that time. African American women were forced into labour for pitiful wages just so Anglo men could exploit the profit to the highest degree.

Another important issue that Mullings addresses is how African American women have been treated by society especially in the media.
Their images have been caricatured in the worst ways to best represent how the images can be most profitable to the Anglo society.

“While the Jezebel image functioned to excuse miscegenation and sexual assault, the Mammy image functioned to rationalize, and justify slavery” (Mullings page 113)

As this shows the images that the Anglos used to represent African American women during and after the ante-bellum period were used to justify what was happening or what had happened. The images, though not as prominent, are still around and continue to be used in a negative way. After reconstruction the image of the Mammy transformed into the image of an emasculated matriarch still giving the negative feelings of unattractiveness. Instead of the friendly

image of the mammy, they now have a harsh nasty creature that Anglo’s would be very hesitant to go near or accept into there societies.

In her book Mullings challenges the ideal of the “nuclear family” (father, mother and two children with the father as the bread winner and the mother staying at home to care for the
children).
This format gives a social stigma against other family units and especially to the African American family which could be very different from the “nuclear family”. For example, during slavery families could be separated with out warning, children taken from mothers, wife’s sold away from husbands. This caused the family unit to not always be blood based; children bought by a slave owner would automatically join the family of the slaves already owned by that owner. So a family unit would have cousins, elders, and newly arrived slaves as well as blood children. After slavery these family units stayed together creating a community where everyone was considered family.

Over all I agree wholly with the authors findings. They are insightful and thought provoking as well as, well researched and proven with sources referenced after every chapter.

The essays are well written but will probably work best for upper- level undergraduates and graduate students. For as with most volumes that include work written over a span of years, some repetition, unevenness and overlap exist.

If I had been the author I would have used slightly easier language to understand. At times I had to read a page twice before I could understand the meaning she was trying to portray.

I would most certainly recommend this book to other students as I found it very enlightening about the plight of African American women compared to African American men or Anglo women. The author explains in her preface that she has faced a lot of the persecution she writes about. It is evident in the writings that they are passionate and give a real feel for the women that faced the discrimination and persecution.