{"id":11323,"date":"2026-03-09T11:47:49","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T15:47:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/?p=11323"},"modified":"2026-07-20T14:47:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T18:47:27","slug":"womens-history-month-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/womens-history-month-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s History Month 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We join the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history by celebrating Women\u2019s History Month<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two Perspectives on African American Women Workers during the Great Depression<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

by Rachel Bohlmann, American History Librarian and Curator<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This March, RBSC celebrates Women\u2019s History Month by highlighting two recent acquisitions about African American women and their place in the labor market during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Both sources recognize the double bind of race and gender discrimination experienced by African American women, but their similarities end there. <\/p>\n\n\n

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African American journalists and Communist Party members Eugene Gordon and Cyril Briggs produced The Position of Negro Women<\/a><\/em> in 1935. It was published in pamphlet form by the Communist Party USA. The authors wasted no time in declaring on the third line, that \u201cThe Negro woman worker is double victimized. She suffers both from the general discrimination against women workers and from her identity as a member of a nationality singled out by the ruling class for special plundering, persecution and oppression.\u201d (p. 2)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The authors described the precarious position African American women held in industrial jobs\u2014largely in laundries, and food and clothing production\u2014as well as in every other part of the labor market. They held up domestic service for special opprobrium, noting that day workers\u2014those who didn\u2019t live in\u2014were the most exploited, making as little as $10 a month (for comparison, women factory workers made $14 a week). Gordon and Briggs also included professional workers in their survey, noting grimly that \u201cThe Negro professional woman worker finds it almost impossible to secure a job.\u201d (p. 11) School teachers were the exception. Although African American teachers in the North were generally paid the same as their white peers, in southern states African American teachers earned less than half, or worse, than that of their white counterparts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gordon and Briggs called for African American and white worker unity through the Communist Party, for workers to rally together to fight discrimination, unemployment, and hunger. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Three years later, Jean Collier Brown, Public Information Assistant of the Women\u2019s Bureau of the Department of Labor, published The Negro Woman Worker<\/a><\/em>. Brown\u2019s was the first report by the department (headed by Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a cabinet) to establish basic facts about where African American women were employed in the labor market, numbers employed, employment opportunities, hours, wages, and working conditions. Although not comprehensive, the report offers significant detail about wage discrimination and terrible working conditions of African American women workers.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Like Gordon and Briggs, Brown began by noting that \u201cThough women in general have been discriminated against and exploited through limitation of their opportunities for employment, through long hours, low wages, and harmful working conditions, such hardships have fallen upon Negro women with double harshness.\u201d (p. 1) From there, the report moved systematically through the major parts of the labor market in which African American women worked: domestic and personal service, agriculture, manufacturing and mechanical industries, and white-collar workers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Gordon and Briggs\u2019 pamphlet aimed to organize workers and rally them to the Communist Party, Brown suggested a multi-pronged approach of social and labor legislation, better education and training opportunities, and trade union organization to address the critical status of African American women workers. Both reports brought much needed attention\u2014for the first time but in quite different ways\u2014to the crisis facing African American women workers during the Great Depression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post Script:<\/em><\/h6>\n\n\n\n

Jean Collier Brown later left the Department of Labor and by 1943 worked as an organizer for the United Domestic Workers Union of the CIO, Baltimore branch, a union of African American domestic laborers.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other Women\u2019s History Month posts on the RBSC blog:<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

2025: The First Women\u2019s Political Party<\/a>
2024: Second-Wave Feminist Articles from an Underground Newspaper<\/a>
2023: Women for Peace and Disarmament<\/a>
2022: The Feminine \u201cMath-tique\u201d<\/a><\/em>
2021: Writing to Rehabilitate in the House of Detention for Women in New York City<\/a>
2020: Mary Taussig Hall and Social Reform<\/a>
2017: A Woman\u2019s Sardonic Eye<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We join the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in commemorating and encouraging the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history by celebrating Women\u2019s History Month. Two Perspectives … Continue reading Women\u2019s History Month 2026<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1936,"featured_media":11341,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12646,75052],"tags":[455963,77948,77931,75749],"class_list":["post-11323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellaneous","category-us-history-culture","tag-african-american-history","tag-otd-holidays","tag-printed-ephemera","tag-recent-acquisitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1936"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11323"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12467,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11323\/revisions\/12467"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/rbsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}