White and black women reformers living in the United States urban North during the era of Jim Crow predominately sought to instill standards of respectability in working-class immigrant and black migrant women in their communities. Black women reformers, who were working to establish their own place of respectability in the social order, employed the strategy of racial uplift. Through their own example and intervention, they attempted to teach working-class black women how to be good wives, mothers, and workers. The rich array of scholarship that examines the ideology and activism of these varied reformers often laments the absence of the voices of the working-class women who were the subject of these reformers' efforts. With few exceptions, they remain as their reformers depicted them, “mute and voiceless” (2). In Talk With You Like a Woman, Cheryl Hicks creatively brings forward some of those voices. Through a careful examination of the records of two New York State reformatories, Hicks recovers the perspectives of black working-class women who were subject to the criminal justice system in the early twentieth century.
Hicks interweaves the women's stories throughout the book, but frames them in three sections of analysis. The first section explores the realities of life for poor black women in New York. It examines their expectations of freedom and the way black communities and black reformers attempted to protect and control them. The second section focuses on the way the criminal justice system treated working women, focusing especially on the abusive treatment by police officers as well as the ways that black female probation officers, white female judges, and even black families used the system to control poor black women. This section exposes the stark contrast between the way the women described and understood their behavior and the state's interpretation and response to them. The final section explores the experiences of poor black women once they were paroled, including the obstacles they faced and the conflicts they endured as they attempted to live their lives according to their own standards.
Hicks' greatest contribution is the illumination of black working-class women's descriptions of their experiences and perceptions. Hicks argues that these voices challenged the view of white and black middle-class reformers that characterized working women as immoral and without respectability. Rather, these voices reveal that most working-class black women shared the reformers' goal of achieving respectability and “labored diligently to uplift themselves and their community” (272), although, importantly, their sense of respectability was distinctive. Working women “defined [their] character and ambition differently from the society that judged [them]” (277). Their definitions rested on the teachings of their families and their communities. They were often unable to achieve their ideals, not because of personal failings, but because of the structural forces of racism and sexism that limited where they lived and worked and made them vulnerable to sexual abuse and violence in their home, the workplace, and on the streets. Specifically, black working women rejected the reformers' ideology of feminine domesticity in their work and personal lives.
Hicks offers an interesting analysis of the way black middle-class reformers and black working-class families used the racist state apparatus in their efforts to persuade working women to conform to their ideals of respectability. Hicks asserts that because middle-class black reformers accepted white society's characterization of poor black women as immoral and unworthy of protection, they failed to challenge the way the police, the courts, and the reformatories treated these women. Working black families, therefore, understood the state as a positive force that could assist them in protecting and controlling their wayward female kin. The state, however, “criminalized rather than rehabilitated” the women who came before it and left unaddressed the social conditions that underlay their behavior (275). This is illustrated compellingly in the accounts of the women who were convicted of manslaughter for killing their abusive husbands, although Hicks provides too scant of an analysis of these cases.
Hicks' recovery of working-class black women's voices adds an important dimension to the narrative of social reform in the early twentieth century. Through their words, Hicks shows how black working-class women crafted their own definitions of respectability and how those definitions drove their behavior. But Hicks leaves the historical narrative primarily intact. Her analysis supports familiar interpretations that identify interracial divisions and intra-racial class tensions between reformers and the objects of their reform, and familiar assessments that reformers used the state in their attempts to control working women as working women resisted. But Hicks' study does provide a deeper understanding of the working women's ideology behind their resistance and places their voices appropriately at the center of the discourse.
