| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit. By Victoria W. Wolcott. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xvi, 335 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2637-5. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-4966-9.)

Victoria W. Wolcott provides a fascinating gender perspective on community formation and racial politics in Detroit. Her focus on the interwar period, a time of massive black migration, comes a decade after Darlene Clark Hine's provocative question:

How is our understanding of black migration and urbanization refined by focusing on the experiences (similar to men in many ways, yet often unique) of the thousands of southern black women who migrated to the Midwest between the two world wars? ("Black Migration to the Urban Midwest," in The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr., 1991, p. 128)

Wolcott answers this question with extensive research into black women's club work, religious practices, light-skin privilege, and neighborhood life, including the informal economy's numbers business, brothels, and bootlegging. Her goal, however, is not simply to uncover the diversity of black women's experiences but to reveal the ways racial ideology was given a gendered voice.

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