A “Body of Business Makers”: The Detroit Housewives League, Black Women Entrepreneurs, and the Rise of Detroit’s African American Business Community

This article examines the Detroit Housewives League (DHL) in the 1930s and 1940s, concentrating on DHL members’ actions as businesswomen. Past narratives have framed the DHL as an extension of the black women’s club movement or as part of the women-driven consumer movements of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly highlighting the organization’s philosophies on black women’s purchasing power. I argue that entrepreneurial DHL women brought prior business knowledge to their organizing and were significant business experts and leaders. By conducting business research, forging community networks, and, significantly, establishing commercial colleges and other forms of business education in the city, DHL members’ work was vital for the black business community as a whole and for women entrepreneurs in particular. In reframing the DHL as an organization established by black entrepreneurial women, I suggest scholars should reevaluate black women’s contributions to other forms of activism in order to recover additional histories of black women’s entrepreneurship and business leadership.

Introduction

This book examines the complexities of Fannie Barrier Williams's life and how she developed intellectual insights into the intersectionality of privilege, race, labor, and gender by crossing regional borders. It explores how Barrier Williams's emergence as an activist influenced the Progressive Era, the women's club movement, the social and economic impact of industrialization on the black community, and the contours of the challenges to racism and discrimination. It shows how Barrier Williams successfully navigated between black and white worlds by gaining a reputation among blacks as a champion of black rights and among whites as a resilient and cooperative leader. It also considers how Barrier Williams' progressive accomplishments in Chicago and her personal connections in both the Northeast and the South endeared her to the national community of black women. The book argues that Barrier Williams' cross-regional mobility enabled her to determine how she lived, as well as the ways she engaged with the black and white communities and how she formulated her ideas.

When I Came Home

The Women's Club movement became the platform for Weil's social activism. Following her mother and aunt's footsteps as a leader of the Goldsboro Woman's Club, she rose in the hierarchy of the state organization, earning the sobriquet “Federation Gertie.” Eschewing marriage, she bonded with other women and remained loyal to her family while working to expand women's role beyond domesticity. An advocate of municipal housekeeping, she urged the women's movement to advocate for children and women exploited in the textile mills. Increasingly, she saw that reform would not progress without women achieving legal rights and pushed the federation to adopt suffrage resolutions.

The Politics of Feminism, Race, Community, and Place in the Florida Film Once Upon a Time (1922)

This essay examines the making of the independent (and no longer extant) film Once Upon a Time (1922), which was produced, directed, and written by Coconut Grove, Florida, resident Ruth Bryan Owen. As a historical and cultural prism, the film grants us a unique view of Owen as an independent filmmaker and someone who, in the late 1920s, would become the first woman elected to the US Congress from the Southern states. It also offers insights into Coconut Grove and Miami as a dynamically charged field of gender, race, and class relations during the early 1920s. For Owen, these years were filled with personal transformation as well as turmoil. South Florida was witnessing exciting changes as well as rising political tensions and strife. Proposed as a one-of-a-kind “community motion picture,” the Arabian Nights tale signaled the dawning of an active Southern Women's Club movement. In this essay, the film serves as a lens—a historical opportunity—to examine a set of social relations and the women's efforts to better their political conditions (and curb local white patriarchal corporate interests) in association with the activities and struggles of the racially segregated neighborhoods the women purported to represent.

Matthews, Victoria Earle

Victoria Earle Matthews (1861–1907), civic leader and activist in the Black women's club movement, became the first president of the Woman's Loyal Union of New York and Brooklyn. In 1897, she also organized the White Rose Industrial Association.

Early Pioneers

Born into a free black family in the early nineteenth century, Josephine Silone Yates was a pioneering woman faculty member at the historically black Lincoln Institute (now University) in Jefferson City, Missouri, where she headed the Department of Natural Sciences. Yates later rose to prominence in the black women’s club movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, serving as president of the famed National Association of Colored Women (NACW) from 1901 to 1905. Josephine was born in 1852 in Mattituck, New York, to Alexander and Parthenia Reeve Silone. She was their second daughter. Her maternal grandfather, Lymas Reeves, had been a slave in Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, but was freed in 1813. Lymas owned a house in Mattituck, and Josephine’s parents lived with him. 1 Josephine’s mother was well educated for the time, and she taught her daughter to read and write at home. Josephine’s earliest and fondest memories were of being taught to read from the Bible while snuggled on her mother’s lap. Her mother made her call out the words as she pointed to them. Josephine began school at age six, where her teachers immediately recognized her preparedness and advanced her rapidly through the elementary grades. At the age of nine, she reportedly studied physiology and physics and possessed advanced mathematical ability. Silone also advanced her writing career at the age of nine, by submitting “a story for publication to a New York weekly magazine. Though the article was rejected for publication, she received a letter of encouragement, which increased her ambition to succeed.” Josephine’s uncle, Reverend John Bunyan Reeve, was the pastor of the Lombard Street Central Church in Philadelphia. Because of his interest in the education of his niece, he convinced his sister, Parthenia, to send Josephine at the age of eleven to live with him in Philadelphia so that she could attend the Institute for Colored Youth directed by Fanny Jackson-Coppin. It was probably felt that Josephine’s education would progress better under the mentorship of Jackson-Coppin.