Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Explanations of Employment Change Among African American Women in the Postindustrial Era

Although the opportunity structure for African Americans has improved since the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s, African American female workers still predominantly occupy jobs offering low wages with no job security. This paper begins to examine the reasons for this stagnation by offering a comprehensive review of scholarship on the employment histories of African American women in the postindustrial era. Using Census data and other historical evidence, I argue that mainstream research on the structure of employment opportunities open to African American women is inadequate. Social-cultural sociologists have spent too much time blaming workers for their employment outcomes, while ignoring the historical and institutional factors that shape these outcomes. At the same time, structural approaches in this literature only hint at the important roles firms play in creating inequality and reducing mobility, and they stop short of exploring how these trends develop over time. In an attempt to shift the emphasis away from individual level and ahistorical structural approaches to understanding African American women’s employment progress, I propose a workplace centered approach that incorporates a consideration of historical and political factors in explanations of blocked opportunity among these workers in the postindustrial era