From Cheap Labor to Good Work: Black Laboring Religious Women’s Organizing and Ethico-Religious Visions in Charleston, SC from 1930-present

Abstract

This uses Black feminist and womanist interpretations of archival and ethnographic data to show how Black working-class women in Charleston, South Carolina, view themselves as religious subjects and workers through their paid and unpaid labor from the early twentieth century to the present. Recently, historians have documented the working lives of Black women in the United States, mainly focusing on the antebellum period to the early twentieth century. However, these accounts mostly depend on archival sources that favor Black upper-middle-class women, like educators and professionals. This project highlights the voices of Black working-class women to demonstrate how they define and advocate for fair work and pay on their own terms. Although labor and religion are often viewed as separate fields, this dissertation uses religious and ethical reflections and practices as a way to explore Charleston’s Black working-class women in an archive that often misses their contributions. Analyzing current historical, cultural, gendered, and religious influences on labor in Charleston helps bring these women into focus in both religious studies and labor studies. This dissertation argues that their beliefs and practices challenge the idea of them as cheap workers and help create a communally imagined, operated, and achieved understanding of fair pay and improved working conditions, referred to as “good work.” The project begins by portraying Charleston’s Black working women as individuals who navigate their understanding of fair wages and treatment, considering changing racial, social, political, and economic conditions. This research then examines how white and Black elites depict Black lower-class people as unable to secure employment and a good life without training in domestic skills and venereal disease testing, which provided white employers with a pool of healthy and morally upright workers. The use of training and testing, along with case studies of Black women employing religious practices, is compared with ethical folk practices—such as singing, shouting, protesting, and physical resistance—to affirm that, by virtue of their humanity, Black religious women laboring in these contexts deserved fair treatment at work. Finally, this work moves to our current moment through ethnographic fieldwork, highlighting the labor, social, kinship, religious, and ethical contexts of nine research participants and demonstrating how they navigate material and social economies within their daily lives. This project aims to expand scholarship on the influence of religion and morality in Black women’s perceptions of their work.