Advanced Courses in US Pluralism
Identity/US Cultures Studies

Date: Fall 1998
Copyright (c) 1998, by The University of Memphis Center for Research on Women
Posted with permission on DiversityWeb.

Team Teaching in Women's History
PARALLEL LIVES: BLACK AND WHITE WOMEN IN AMERICAN HISTORY
By Janann Sherman
The University of Memphis

When Dr. Beverly Bond joined the history faculty in 1995, one year after I came to The University of Memphis, we met frequently to exchange ideas and information. I eagerly sought her as a resource for her area of expertise, black women's history, while I shared my knowledge of women's-that is, white women's-history. It was not long before we recognized a parallel, but seldom overlapping, development of both histories, not only as academic disciplines but as lived experience.

United States women's history is a relatively new field of study. Arising from the ferment of the 1960s and the development of the women's movement, the earliest scholarship began to reach print only 25 years ago. For the most part, that history was developed by, and focused on, middle and upper-class white women.

Beginning with a compensatory search for the Great Women of the past, scholars initially hoped an understanding of the lives of women who succeeded on male terms could help liberate all women. Soon realizing the limits of a search for role models, women's historians expanded their study to include women in a wide variety of circumstances, exploring how those women shaped their lives in their own terms. The result was increasing sensitivity to the complex interplay of many social, economic and political forces in shaping women's worlds.

As more women of color entered the field, fostering a parallel development of racially diverse women's history, they began asking many of the same questions about historical agency while at the same time enriching the discipline with their explorations of race, class and gender among women of color.

In our preliminary comparisons of black and white women's history, Dr. Bond and I found that both groups of women were deeply involved in a wide variety of reform movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-building hospitals, funding libraries, advocating temperance, dispensing charity-but seldom together.

Black and white women workers participated in labor movements and pressed for labor reform-but seldom together. In activities where there was interracial collaboration (within abolition, suffrage and the civil rights movement, for example), it was often short-lived and fraught with tension and division.

The separate histories told us about the experiences of black and white women in isolation from one another, seemingly headed in the same direction but seldom connecting. As scholars, and as women grounded in American culture, we wanted to interrupt such parallel lines and linear patterns.

Particularly useful to us in thinking about intersections and confluences was historian Elsa Barkley Brown's admonition that historians must look beyond notions of difference per se in order to examine the relational nature of those differences. Black and white women's histories, like their lives, exist simultaneously and in dialogue with one other. Dr. Bond and I decided to begin our own search for this relational nature in specific historical contexts, and to take a group of students along with us.

Parallel Lives: Black and White Women in American History, a combined undergraduate/graduate-level course, traced a chronology of black and white women's relational lives through 19th and 20th century America. From both perspectives, and mindful of class distinctions, we scrutinized and debated women's goals and strategies, successes and shortcomings, affiliations and altercations, points of connection and estrangement.

Since little existing scholarship addressed comparisons, we adopted a parallel framework, lining up separate materials on black women and on white women. We sought to provide enough information that we might tease out connections and draw conclusions about how and in what settings black and white women could and did work together, and about how and when the barriers of race (and class) divided them, rendering cooperation toward a common goal or even assumptions of a common goal impossible.

We envisioned our quest as something like the double helix pattern of DNA-that is, black and white women as strands that come together and intersect, meet and cross, sometimes link for a time, cohere at certain points, yet seldom forge bonds strong enough to keep them together very long.

We used a variety of pedagogical tools in the course, arrayed around a discussion format of assigned readings augmented by mini-lectures. No text existed for such a course; as far as we could ascertain, no course like it had ever been taught.

Since Dr. Bond specializes in the history of I 8th and 19th century black women and I in 19th and 20th century white women, together we had a pretty good understanding of the periods and themes in question. Gathering the readings and choosing among them was time consuming and, in some cases, discouraging in the unevenness of the scholarship. In the end, we selected a couple of anthologies that contained a number of articles we found useful, and supplemented them with abundant materials we put on reserve at the library.

The readings presented black and white perspectives and the lectures set the context. Class discussions focused on comparisons and connections. At the outset, we endeavored to establish a "safe" environment in the classroom for discussing sensitive issues, a project that was enhanced, we believe, because we represented both black and white women and expressed regard and respect for one another, and for our students.

We began with a film from the 1950s called Imitation of Life. The four major characters were female: a glamorous aspiring actress and her daughter, and a black woman who worked as her domestic and her daughter.

The inter-relationality of these characters' lives was central, and the subplot, involving the black woman's daughter's efforts to "pass for white" provided drama and abundant material for discussion about historical context, cultural assumptions, identity and experience in black and white women's lives. This was also a very good way to introduce the themes of the course and get everyone talking to one another after the shared experience of watching the film. This session and the following one also focused on a handful of readings on interracial friendships and sisterhood.

We then began our historical journey from the plantation household where black and white women's lives were closely intertwined, to an exploration of black and white women and their strategies during the Jim Crow era. Woman suffrage and the birth control movement presented opportunities for interracial collaboration at the turn of the century.

Then came black and white women in the civil rights movement, in the women's rights movement, and in the evolution of feminism. We closed the course with current debates about women and public policy. Research projects required oral interviews with women of racial/ethnic groups other than the one with which the student identified, and graduate students added analyses of black and white women's interactional strategies in specific historical situations.

In lieu of a final exam, students designed and presented a quilt square. Modeled after ancestral story quilts, these encouraged creativity and reflection. Designs were compiled into a "class quilt" distributed to all students at the conclusion of the course. Team teaching was a new experience for both of us but, perhaps because of our initial mutual conception of the course, this proved to be very positive. Our agenda was heroic, and as we revise it, remains so.

Comparisons of black and white women's histories continue to engage our intellectual imaginations. And while we did not begin to uncover all we wished, we came away convinced of the value of shared quest as a pedagogical tool.

Students who completed the course attested to its value. However, reading assignments were lengthy and discussions intense, requiring a good deal of commitment and responsibility that some students found overwhelming. As we incorporate the lessons learned in a new formulation of Parallel Lives, we eagerly anticipate rejoining the quest together.

Printed from the University of Memphis Center for Research on Women Fall 1998 newsletter. View the syllabus for the course "Parallel Lives: Black and White Women in American History." For additional information on this course, contact Janann Sherman, assistant professor of history at the University of Memphis: sherman@memphis.edu