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Prologue

Different Pasts, Different Starting Gates

“We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: ‘I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.’”1

These words, written by Betty Friedan in 1963, galvanized the movement that reshaped female aspirations, launched women into the workforce, and changed the course of history.2 The “problem that has no name,” as she described women’s malaise, branded the ensuing movement as feminism.

Yet from the get-go, Friedan’s vision of feminism was not universal. While white, middle-class women framed access to work outside the home as a form of liberation, black women yearned to be liberated from work—from low-paying jobs with poor working conditions where they had little to no opportunity for advancement. As black feminist author and activist bell hooks challenged, “[Friedan] did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute than to be a leisure-class housewife.”3 For the vast majority of black women in 1963, the work available to them was a source of oppression, not liberation; a necessity, not a luxury; a constraint on their fulfillment, not an avenue toward it.

This is not to say that black women had no part in the feminist movement of the 1960s. On the contrary, black women were, in fact, on the frontlines of not one, but two fights for equal rights in the mid-twentieth century. Many black feminists stretched their activism to push for the rights for both women and blacks, often from the margins of both movements. Some black feminists were directly involved in the women’s liberation movement, like Civil Rights activist and lawyer Pauli Murray, who cofounded the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 alongside Friedan, and Ms. Magazine cocreator Dorothy Pitman Hughes, who collaborated closely with Gloria Steinem to found the Women’s Action Alliance; others campaigned for the rights of black women specifically, such as bell hooks and womanist author and activist Alice Walker.4 Many of the most influential black feminists, including Frances Beale, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, Florynce Kennedy and Cellestine Ware, to name just a few, identified more closely with the fight for Civil Rights than with women’s liberation, but their leadership in the Black Power movement wasn’t lost on the leaders of the women’s movement.5 As Gloria Steinem reflected in a 2015 interview, “I learned feminism largely from black women. Women of color basically invented feminism.”6

What united these early black and white feminist leaders was their quest for equality. Pan-Africanist writer and political activist Amy Jacques Garvey presaged Friedan by several decades when she wrote that the modern woman “prefers to be a bread-winner than a half-starved wife at home.”7 Yet white women’s career-minded approach to this shared dream grated on black women, as it glossed over glaring racial inequities. As Jacques Garvey pointed out, “White women have greater opportunities to display their ability because of the standing of both races…yet who is more deserving of admiration than the black woman, she who has borne the rigors of slavery, the deprivations consequent on a pauperized race, and the indignities heaped upon a weak and defenseless people?”8

What separated black and white feminists was not the destination they envisioned, but rather where they began and the steps they perceived as necessary to attain their goal. “I saw white women as having privilege,” observes former Washington, DC Councilwoman Charlene Drew Jarvis. “We were not starting at the same place.” Indeed, black women struggled even to be seen as women, let alone as women who deserved more respect and accommodation from men. As Sojourner Truth, one of the founding mothers of feminism, observed in 1851, “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?”9

Different starting gates inspired separate strategies for change, ultimately setting black and white women on divergent paths towards empowerment in the workplace and beyond.10

Women’s Work

In her 2014 speech in acceptance of the Hollywood Reporter’s Sherry Lansing Leadership award, Shonda Rhimes gave Hollywood women a congratulatory pat on the back. “Thirty years ago, I’d think maybe there’d be a thousand secretaries fending off their handsy bosses back at the office, and about two women in Hollywood in this room,” Rhimes said. Then she observed, “And if I were here, I would be serving breakfast.”11

Rhimes’s point—that between then and now, women have made extraordinary progress—serves to underscore not just white and black women’s achievements, but also the chasm between their trajectories. Thirty years ago, a handful of white women had managed to battle their way to the top in a few professions, notably entertainment and media, with the majority forced to choose between becoming secretaries and staying home with their children. Most black women didn’t even have that choice.

The contrast between the experience of white and black working women in the early twentieth century is stark. White women’s path into the workplace is a now-familiar story: when World War II emptied factories and offices of men, women were able to enter male-dominated occupations for the first time.12 From manufacturing planes to piloting them, and from putting out newspapers to practicing medicine, Rosie the Riveter broke down workplace barriers in the name of patriotism. By the 1950s, however, the influx of recently-returned men forced many of these women to exit the workforce.13 Those who could afford to leave became housewives and stay-at-home mothers, setting the stage for both America’s burgeoning middle class and for Friedan’s “problem that has no name.”14

Black women also saw an occupational shift during the war: many left sharecropping—an exploitative system of plantation farming whose roots extended back into slavery—to work in factories or institutions like schools and hospitals.15 But most of the industries that had welcomed white women as skilled or semi-skilled laborers were not willing to hire black women,16 as Maya Angelou discovered when, in wartime San Francisco, she went to the railway personnel office to apply for a job as streetcar conductor. “The receptionist was not innocent and neither was I,” she writes. “The whole charade we had played out in that crummy waiting room had directly to do with me, Black, and her, white.”17

Angelou paid innumerable visits to that office before she finally became San Francisco’s first black streetcar conductor. Most black women were not so lucky. They had to settle for low-paying, dangerous, or demeaning jobs with no chance of advancement. In airplane assembly plants, for example, black women suffocated in unventilated “dope rooms” full of noxious glue fumes; in sintering plants, they were baked in the heat of blasting furnaces and coated in iron ore dust.18 In safer venues, like hospitals, black women were confined to undesirable roles such as those in laundry and janitorial services.19 When the men returned from the front, moreover, working black women didn’t go home. As they had before the war, approximately one third of married black women continued to work outside the home—a rate that far outstripped their married white peers.20

As the women’s liberation movement picked up steam in the sixties and seventies, black and white women continued to follow different career trajectories. Some white women battled their way into male-dominated workspaces, seeking liberation from suburban homemaking as per Friedan’s model. This depiction of white women’s working experience is, of course, heavily dependent on a certain level of economic privilege. For the 25 percent of families headed by white women living at or below the poverty line, the story was quite different. 21

Still, even white women of lesser means faced fewer barriers to success than their black peers. Despite avenues provided by the Civil Rights movement and the introduction of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, black women faced the double liability of racial discrimination and economic need.22 Barely four generations had passed since the end of slavery; most black families simply had not had the time to accrue the wealth whites had been building for centuries, and Jim Crow laws continued to limit the ability of black families to accumulate material property.23 This ongoing racial discrimination and segregation plagued even middle-class black women’s entry into the corporate world. Instead, black women like Charlene Drew Jarvis found some success in the public sector, where antidiscrimination policy was more vigorously enforced.24

History Maker: Charlene Drew Jarvis

In 1950, when Charlene Drew Jarvis was eight years old, she lost her father. Dr. Charles Drew, the surgeon and researcher whose work culminated in the American Red Cross Blood Bank, died in a car accident, leaving his wife to raise their four children alone. “I saw how she took charge when he died,” Drew Jarvis recalls. “I saw a remarkable woman take on all that she needed to take on to raise four children. She was independent—and very gutsy.” Indeed, when Drew Jarvis won acceptance to Oberlin College, she watched in amazement as her mother, a former Spelman College professor, called up classmates of her father’s from Amherst to ask if they would help with the tuition. And when her younger sister Sylvia prepared to go to college, her mother called on Eleanor Roosevelt for help. “We didn’t know the former first lady!” Drew Jarvis laughs. “That’s when I saw in my mother that she was not afraid. She’d find what she needed. And she’d figure out how to get it.”

Drew Jarvis’s own career honors the examples set by both her mother and father. In 1965, armed with a Master’s degree in psychology, she received a pre-doctoral appointment at the National Institute of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, MD. She did not encounter, professionally, efforts to block her progress as an African American. But at Howard University, where she had earned her Master’s degree, she did encounter prejudice as a woman. “By that time, I was married and had a child and was pregnant with my second,” she says. “The Dean of the School of Social Work thought I couldn’t accomplish both being in school and raising children. I thought, ‘Yes I can.’” She completed her PhD in neuropsychology at the University of Maryland in 1971 and continued working at the NIH for eight more years. As her father had often told her, “Excellence of performance will overcome any obstacles created by man.”

And in the footsteps of her father she might well have continued. But she felt a growing disconnect between her daily reality “in the ivory tower,” and the lived experience of those in the black community around her. Ten years after the riots following the 1968 death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington, DC was a predominantly black city surrounding a white Capitol Hill. “I had some responsibility, as an African American,” she says. “So I left science and went into public life.”

Drew Jarvis was elected to the Council of the District of Columbia to fill a vacated seat in 1979; for the next five terms, from 1980 to 1996, she won reelection to that seat. In 1981, she began her nineteen-year tenure as chair of the Council’s Committee on Economic Development. In 1982, she made a valiant attempt to unseat Mayor Marion Barry. With each campaign, she says, she summoned the courage she’d seen her mother demonstrate. “It was gutsy for me to run for public office when I hadn’t been in city politics at all,” Drew Jarvis reflects. “It was gutsy to leave science and a career for which I had trained to be in the public domain and help address economic vitality problems. And it took a lot of guts to push back, not just on Mayor Barry but also on his administration. I had two little children and a husband at the time. I said to my mother, ‘This is a little gutsy! I need you to help me over the next six months.’ And she did.

“But I was sure I would prevail,” Drew Jarvis continues. “The way I thought of it was, if you set your sights on doing something—and I saw the end goal as really important—then you can succeed. Or as my mother often said, ‘Just put one foot in front of the other.’”

Four years before the end of her last term on the Council, Drew Jarvis set her sights on transforming Southeastern University, an institution founded by the YMCA that was in danger of losing its accreditation. Drew Jarvis saw it as a vital bridge for black businesspeople who knew all about the service they intended to provide, but not the art of doing business—and who lacked access to capital. She saw they might acquire the know-how and the connections they needed if, through Southeastern, they were matched with larger corporations. “So I took over the institution,” she says, “and did both jobs as legislator and president for four years.” She oversaw Southeastern for nine years before it merged with another institution.

Social goals were paramount in every role she ever held. Even at the NIH, she got involved in minority recruiting, to attract more women and people of color to get into research. “No matter where I was, I was always thinking, how am I advancing people of color?” she observes. “I realized you needed to be at helm, so I looked to be in that position.”

Ever eager “to play in the field I was in,” Drew Jarvis was determined never to present as a threat, racially. “I wanted outcomes to be equivalent in terms of my own performance,” she says. “And because I was conscientious and determined to make a good outcome, maybe I didn’t experience the same things as other black women. But I could never be sure I was being evaluated in the same way. And I was afraid the outcome would reflect that.” Reflexively she tried to minimize the likelihood of being judged according to stereotype. She recalls a visit to the University of Maryland bookstore where her conversation with the cashier prompted him to say, “Your English is so precise, are you a teacher?” Drew Jarvis realized she had enunciated every word so as not to be perceived, as a minority student, to be lacking in education. “The unconscious things you do, to avoid the stereotype threat,” she muses. “I always assumed white people would assume I was not able to compete.”

While stereotypes continue to drive unequal outcomes, she says, momentous change is afoot. “We’re in revolution in this country with respect to visibility,” she observes. “Blacks have a long history of invisibility. Not antagonism, but invisibility. And it seems to me, a curtain has been pulled back. There are many in the white community saying, ‘I didn’t know; I didn’t understand; I didn’t see. Now I do.’” As a result of what’s become more visible, Drew Jarvis feels that the country may be on a path to greater equity. “People with good intentions have engaged in unconscious biases that have led to outcomes that may look the same as deliberate malevolence—and they’re realizing that,” she says. “Gradually, it’s changing.”

Like the public sector, education was an avenue to combat the stigma of race: black women who could afford it began to pursue higher education in greater numbers in the 1970s and ’80s, with the integration of schools and the rise of black universities.25 Yet, even with a college degree in hand, black women still tended to be employed in jobs that offered little in terms of career advancement or income growth.26 For example, in the field of clerical work—a “pink collar” career that only became accessible to black women in the latter half of the twentieth century—black women were vastly overrepresented in low-skill, low-pay occupations, such as file clerk and keypunch operator.27 And this despite the likelihood, as our interviewees observe, that these black women held college degrees.28

History Maker: Geri Thomas

In the summer of 1970, between her freshman and sophomore years at Georgia State University, Geri Thomas applied for temporary jobs at three businesses: a retail establishment, Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company, and Citizens and Southern National Bank. Thomas got offers from all three companies. She accepted the bank’s offer, which was to work in operations, managing people’s accounts. “I’m going to have to straighten my hair,” Thomas, who wore a large Afro, remembers telling her mother.

She kept her Afro. She also stayed on that fall. Thomas would, in fact, stay on at the bank for the next forty-five years, working her way from operations at Citizens and Southern to global chief diversity officer at what became, through a series of mergers, Bank of America. When Thomas retired from the bank in 2016, it was as a business leader—the first woman in her family, and among the first black women of her generation, to be in business, let alone to be an executive in a multinational corporation.

None of that was apparent to her that summer of 1970, however. Racism was rampant, despite the legal protections afforded by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While black people worked at the bank, they didn’t hold supervisory roles, despite the fact that many had college degrees. “Men and women who were white didn’t have degrees, the chief credit officer didn’t have a degree,” she says, “so that was an aha moment: clearly the standards were different.”

Racism had constrained her parents’ career paths, even though her mother was college-educated. Middle-class black women could be leaders in education or health, as head nurses or school principals, provided they worked in all-black hospitals or schools. Because her mother, a teacher, worked outside the home, Thomas never doubted she would, as well; and because racial barriers were lifting, she saw no reason to limit her aspirations. “My sister and I, we both decided, no way are we going to teach!” Thomas recalls. “That was hard, that was a twenty-four-seven job! Working nine to four in a bank looked good. And when I went to work at the bank? It reinforced what I’d always believed—that I had the intellectual ability and drive to succeed no matter what other people thought black people could and could not do.”

The challenge initially, she reflects, was logistical: to make it all work, she put her studies at Georgia State on hold temporarily, instead investing her time in getting to know her white coworkers and managers—not by suppressing her opinions when asked, but by saying what she thought. “I had a reputation for speaking my mind,” she says. “At my retirement party, that was something everybody noted: you could count on Geri to be utterly straight with you.” But back then, she remarks, it was easier for black and white people to be forthright with each other. “We went to parties at each others’ homes,” she points out. “We invested in getting to know each other, socially and culturally. We could ask questions. We’d talk about everything, and no one felt threatened.” Many of the white people she invested in getting to know back then, she says, wound up at her retirement party last year; she went to their children’s weddings, and they attended her children’s weddings. She just doesn’t see people forging those kinds of relationships today. “There was more of a willingness, back then, to put yourself out there and be authentic,” she reflects.

Her investment paid off. Thomas was promoted through a series of back-office functions and then moved into HR, where she handled recruiting and oversaw hiring for all of the bank’s lines of business.

Then came the acid test. Shortly after she arrived in HR, the bank announced it was freezing all hiring, and that there would be lay-offs in each department. Thomas braced for bad news. “I was last to come in, so when they said they’d be cutting, I assumed it would be me that would be the first to go,” she recalls. But when the dust settled—and despite the fact she hadn’t yet finished her degree—she still had her job. For the first time, Thomas says, it occurred to her that, despite working in an environment so white she had to walk outside to see another person of color, she had career prospects. Her opinion mattered; colleagues sought her out for it (“People would ask me what I thought, and I was silly enough to believe they wanted me to tell them,” she recalls. “And I would.”). Three years later, when the woman for whom she’d worked in HR started reporting to her, Thomas realized what those prospects were: management.

Certainly she felt herself capable. “I often assessed my supervisors and thought, ‘Seriously?’ I knew for sure I was smarter than a lot of people ahead of me. And I worked hard enough, so why wouldn’t I be running things? If I’m going to do it, why wouldn’t I be at the top? That’s how I approached it.”

And while she was under no illusion that her opportunities were equivalent to what was offered to her white peers, she saw a pathway to leadership open up for her. When Nation’s Bank (later rebranded as Bank of America) took over in the nineties, Thomas was invited to be on its first diversity council. In 2002, she was appointed to run its diversity and inclusion practice, and in 2009, she became Georgia market president, a position that tasked her with driving business integration opportunities across the state as well as overseeing corporate social responsibility. No one in HR had ever been asked to take on that role, but with her ties to the greater Atlanta community—Thomas sits on the boards of Councilors of the Carter Center and the Buckhead Coalition, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Atlanta Committee for Progress, the Georgia State University Foundation, Leadership Atlanta, and the Executive Leadership Council—no one else, as her sponsor pointed out, was nearly as qualified. “He said, ‘Geri, I’ve thought about this, I’ve talked with Ken Lewis, we’ve looked around, and you’re the only person really who could be market president.’” Thomas thought about it, and agreed. “If you’re going to have to do the work, you may as well have the role,” she remembers her husband telling her.

Looking back on her career today, Thomas takes pride in the fact that she succeeded on the basis of who she was. “I never wanted to be viewed as not authentic,” she says. “If people asked me what I thought, I’d tell them. I was bold, because I was willing to accept the consequences. Not everybody is.” She reflects a moment and then adds, “I did it on my terms. And at some point, my terms were okay with everybody else.”

Despite significant barriers to success, some black women pushed through to positions of national prominence. Shirley Chisholm, for example, made history when she was elected to Congress in 1968 and further demolished both racial and gender barriers when she announced her bid for presidency in 1972 under the auspices of the Feminist Party.29 Coretta Scott King, another trailblazer, kept the memory and mission of her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., alive through her outspoken condemnation of the South African system of apartheid in the 1980s.30 Writers Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker garnered international acclaim with their unflinching portraits of black women and men; Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.31

It is no coincidence, however, that most of the leadership gains made by black women in the past three decades have been outside the corridors of corporate America. While black women today find themselves, as Rhimes noted, far better off than they were thirty years ago in terms of access to white-collar professions, within those professions they are still confronting challenges that slow their advancement and deny them empowerment. As a result, we find they’re even more stuck and stalled than white women: 17 percent of white women make it to the marzipan layer, that sticky band of management below leadership, but only 9 percent of black women do. Indeed, black women hold a mere 5 percent of managerial and professional positions, and less than 3 percent of the board seats of Fortune 500 companies.32 And just one black woman—Xerox CEO Ursula Burns—helms a Fortune 500 company.33 These numbers are all the more dismal in light of the fact that many Fortune 500 companies target high-potential women with initiatives aimed specifically at advancing them into leadership.

Black women’s career stall stems in part from the fact that antidiscrimination measures look at race and gender separately. As we have seen, diversity initiatives and activist groups frequently target women or people of color, but not black women, who are marginalized by both groups—an approach that race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw attributes to widespread failure to grasp the intersectionality of black women’s experience.34 “When African American women or any other women of color experience either compound or overlapping discrimination,” she observes, “the law…just [is] not there to come to their defense.”35 So while Fortune 500 companies congratulate themselves on having met their diversity quota with a (still meager) 17 percent of women directors, the vast majority of those women are white.36 As Crenshaw puts it, “Women of color are invisible in plain sight.”37

With findings from nationally representative survey data and scores of interviews, we intend to probe this intersection, and put an end to black women’s invisibility. It is our contention that feminism can only move forward for all women if first we recognize—and honor—the differences among women.