Start Date
12-6-2011 9:30 AM
End Date
12-6-2011 12:00 PM
Subject Areas
North America, modern, gender, labor/business
Abstract
Part of a larger dissertation titled, Soles on the Sidewalk: the Bronx Slave Markets from the 1920s to the 1950s, this draft is the first portion of a chapter focused on the intersection of migration and the spatial construction of the north through migrant letters.
This draft deals with the notion of hope and prosperity that inspired many black women, especially those in domestic service, to pack their bags and head north. Hope coupled with desire is powerful motivation for movement. This section uses the letters of black migrants to understand how particularly domestic workers including laundresses envisioned northern spaces and articulated their conceptions by expressing their availability for work. Their words cast the North as a place of promise and possibility. Their sentences reveal how travel became an intimate gesture, an action born of desire and necessity, yet framed by their understanding of what awaited them in the future. Their letters carry clues to the details of dreams women felt appropriate to express to their audiences of editors, potential employers, church members, family and friends through the medium of writing. I argue that the intangible desires for worth, respect, and personal betterment coupled with the impetus for employment motivated women to look northward. More than bricks and mortar, the letters and artifacts women sent reveal notions of a public imagination of northern prosperity.
Keywords
Migration, Black Domestic Workers, Place
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
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When Hope Is A Place: Building and Protecting Subjective Ideas of the North through the Letters of Black Women Migrants
Part of a larger dissertation titled, Soles on the Sidewalk: the Bronx Slave Markets from the 1920s to the 1950s, this draft is the first portion of a chapter focused on the intersection of migration and the spatial construction of the north through migrant letters.
This draft deals with the notion of hope and prosperity that inspired many black women, especially those in domestic service, to pack their bags and head north. Hope coupled with desire is powerful motivation for movement. This section uses the letters of black migrants to understand how particularly domestic workers including laundresses envisioned northern spaces and articulated their conceptions by expressing their availability for work. Their words cast the North as a place of promise and possibility. Their sentences reveal how travel became an intimate gesture, an action born of desire and necessity, yet framed by their understanding of what awaited them in the future. Their letters carry clues to the details of dreams women felt appropriate to express to their audiences of editors, potential employers, church members, family and friends through the medium of writing. I argue that the intangible desires for worth, respect, and personal betterment coupled with the impetus for employment motivated women to look northward. More than bricks and mortar, the letters and artifacts women sent reveal notions of a public imagination of northern prosperity.