Sadie Alexander, Black Women's Work, and Economic Citizenship during the New Deal Era

Sadie Alexander, Black Women’s Work, and Economic Citizenship during the New Deal Era

 The interwar years, especially the New Deal era, proved to be a pivotal moment in remapping the relationship between the state and labor. During this time, state actors and workers shored up a highly gendered and racialized vision of economic citizenship that further linked white men’s wage labor to citizenship rights. In this paper, I argue that Sadie Alexander – the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in economics and a successful practicing lawyer – offered an alternative, black feminist definition of economic citizenship that shifted discourses on the relationship between race, gender, labor, and the meaning of citizenship at this critical moment. In particular, this paper examines Alexander’s studies of black women’s work in the 1920s and 1930s, through her published and unpublished writings, as well as several speeches to reveal how her imagination of political identity challenged prevailing definitions of economic citizenship. By defining black women’s labor as constitutive of citizenship, Sadie Alexander not only claimed full economic citizenship for black women, but also placed economic freedom, and its inextricable ties to gender, at the heart of the civil rights struggle. Her analysis reveals the ways in which a prioritization of the intersectional nature of black women’s class, race and gender identities was utilized as a platform for collective racial advancement at a moment traditionally understood to be dominated by the logic of “manhood rights” as an organizing civil rights ethos.