Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
African American Women ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Financial Stability ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Working Lives ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
Labor Patterns

During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. This book illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business. Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, the book teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. It also offers a surprising revelation, arguing that the burgeoning underground economy served as a catalyst in working-class black women's creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, urban black women, all striving for economic and social prospects and pleasures, experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.

Black Women, Urban Labor, and New York’s Informal Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Collateral Consequences ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Informal Labor ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
Social Opportunities ◽  
Wage Earners

This chapter offers an overview of black women informal workers both as wage earners and entrepreneurs, positioning their experiences at the center of New York's informal labor market. It highlights working-class black women's socioeconomic conditions and the ways in which economic distress coupled with varying perceptions of urban public space and racial uplift motivated some women's attraction to nontraditional modes of labor. New York black women viewed the economic and social opportunities offered by off-the-books labor as a path toward altering the recipe of possibilities for themselves. But securing extralegal and unlicensed labor that disrupted normative gender roles and racial hierarchies and ideas about public decorum came at a price. Collateral consequences were certainly part of some black women's trajectory as underground workers and entrepreneurs. This chapter also considers the dangers and obstacles associated with self-employment and laboring for employers willing to pay them under the table.

“I Have My Own Room on 139th Street”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
LaShawn Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Socioeconomic Conditions ◽  
Personal Lives ◽  
Sexual Labor ◽  
Sexual Services

This chapter explores black women's multilayered roles within New York's sex commerce, moving beyond widely accepted historical interpretations that position black sex laborers primarily as street solicitors. Identifying black women as madam-prostitutes, casual prostitutes, and sex-house proprietors and entrepreneurs, this chapter addresses the difficulties of documenting sex work within black communities, the broad socioeconomic conditions and personal circumstances outlining black women's entrance into the urban sexual economy, and the occupational benefits of indoor prostitution. In an attempt to avoid or limit their presence on New York streets, black sex workers—when the opportunity arose—sold and performed sexual services in furnished rooms and hotels, in their own homes, in massage parlors and nightclubs, and in other legitimate and illegitimate commercial businesses. Furthermore, indoor and residential sexual labor was significant to sex laborers' working and personal lives.

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