This work explores the inner world of American black professional women during the Jim Crow era. It is a story of struggle and empowerment, of the strength of a group of women who worked against daunting odds to improve the world for themselves and their people. Shaw has done research into the lives of social workers, librarians, nurses and teachers from the 1870s through the 1950s. The women tell, in their own words, about their families, their values and their expectations. Shaw explains the forces and factors that made them exceptional and of the choices and commitments that made them leaders in their communities. This book explores a world in which African-American families, communities and schools worked to encourage the self-confidence, individual initiative and social responsibility of girls. Shaw shows how, in a society that denied black women full professional status, these girls embraced and in turn defined an ideal of "socially responsible individualism" that balanced private and public sphere responsibilities.
A collective portrait of character shaped in the toughest circumstances, this book aims to provide more than a study of the socialization of these women as children and the organization of their work as adults. It also provides a study of leadership - of how African American communities gave their daughters the power to succeed in and change a hostile world.