title: What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Women in Culture and Society)
author:  Stephanie J. Shaw 
description: In a highly original study of women, race, and class, Stephanie J. Shaw takes us into the inner world of black professional women during the Jim Crow era. This is a story of struggle and empowerment, of the strength of a group of women who worked against daunting odds to improve the world for themselves and their people. Shaw's remarkable research into the lives of social workers, librarians, nurses, and teachers from the 1870s through the 1950s allows us to hear these women's voices for the first time. The women tell us, in their own words, about their families, their values, their expectations. We learn of the forces and factors that made them exceptional, and of the choices and commitments that made them leaders in their communities. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do brings to life a world in which African-American families, communities, and schools worked to encourage the self-confidence, individual initiative, and social responsibility of girls. Shaw shows us how, in a society that denied black women full professional status, these girls embraced and in turn defined an ideal of "socially responsible individualism" that balanced private and public sphere responsibilities. A collective portrait of character shaped in the toughest circumstances, this book is more than a study of the socialization of these women as children and the organization of their work as adults. It is also a study of leadership - of how African American communities gave their daughters the power to succeed in and change a hostile world.
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  # Jane Murray's Thanksgiving Story
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Rebecca Harding Davis
  
  
  This page copyright © 2001 Blackmask Online.
  
  
  http://www.blackmask.com
  
  
  IT was late in October and the Woman's Academy of Starboro was waking from its
  Summer's doze, and making ready for the Winter's work. The Academy, being a
  feeder for a great Woman's College, stood, so its prospectus declared, "in the
  van of the Movement for the Highest Development of Woman." Even the gardeners,
  who were taking up the dead leaves on the great lawns which sloped from the
  pillared porches to the bay, and the scrubbers, flooding the classrooms, their
  skirts pinned up and their heads swathed in dusty cheesecloth, worked as if
  they knew the tremendous importance of this building to the world's progress.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Miss Clemens, the Principal, gave them a stately nod of approval. She knew
  that they would not work so hard in an ordinary house. "Even these poor shreds
  of womanhood ar