The sexless lives of college -educated Black women: When education means no man, marriage, or baby

This dissertation investigates the relationship between inequality and family formation. It analyzes qualitative data from 60 interviews with college-educated African American women. These data are used to illuminate connections between these women\u27s decision-making on marriage, sexual activity, contraception, and abortion and their positioning within and negotiations of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Degreed black women are utilized as expert informants on the mechanisms linking reproductive choices to educational and economic attainment because they have both low fertility rates and high educational achievement. The study also analyzes quantitative data from the National Survey of Family Growth [NCHS, 1995] to discuss the implications of degreed black women\u27s sexual and reproductive decision-making for the reproduction of the class structure within the black community. Using NSFG [NCHS, 1995] data, this research assesses the role of race and class differences in interactions with the proximate determinants to fertility in the creation of group differences in fertility. The study finds that degreed black women face barriers to marriage linked to their racial and gender statuses and to processes associated with their class attainment. Furthermore, it finds that degreed black women\u27s fertility is low relative to similarly educated whites and Hispanics and relative to less educated black women in part because of this difficulty that they have marrying and staying married and in part because they are resistant to nonmarital childbearing. Fears of stigma, negative judgment, and the withdrawal of support and opportunity for educational and economic achievement motivate highly educated black women to engage in some sexual and family formation behaviors and to reject others: in particular, status-seeking black women are led by messages received from the cultural knowledge, meaning, and evaluative system to reject nonmarital childbearing even when marriage is unavailable. The study concludes that the marital and symbolic factors that structure highly educated black women\u27s low fertility in effect reproduce disadvantage in the black community as they concentrate childbearing in the lower classes of that community