Pedagogies of Dissemblance: The Black Women's Club Movement and Education as a Tool Against Sexual Exploitation

• In Event: 68.021 - Innovations: Exploring Theoretical and Methodological Approaches in the History of Black Education

Abstract

In 1989, historian Darlene Clark Hine advanced a concept called the “culture of dissemblance,” which she argued animated much of post-Emancipation black women’s history. In response both to negative stereotypes of black female licentiousness and to the reality of black women’s vulnerability to inter- and intra-racial sexual violence, Hine argued that black women have historically created, through strategic silence about their own sexuality, a level of sexual inviolability which was denied them in broader society. This “culture of dissemblance,” Hine argued, “assumed its most institutionalized form in the founding, in 1896, of the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs (NACW).” “At the core of essentially every activity of NACW's individual members,” Hine argued, “was a concern with creating positive images of Black women's sexuality” (Hine 1989, p. 917-918).

Widely recognized as the among the most significant accomplishments of the women of the NACW are the many schools these women founded across the South. Historians of African American education have established that the schools black women built after Emancipation were meant to institutionalize both racial uplift (by equipping the first generations of free black people with the practical tools necessary for civic participation and economic citizenship) and black excellence (by cultivating black professionals and a black leadership class) (Perkins 1983; Perkins 1987; Johnson 2000; Taylor-Webb 2002; McCluskey 2014). However, historians have yet to deeply assess the relevance of Hine’s ‘dissemblance’ thesis to the trajectory of African American education after Emancipation. This paper probes the extent to which NACW women’s “obsession with providing Black women with protection from sexual exploitation and with dignified work” animated the efforts of the school founders among their ranks (Hine 1989).

I argue that by examining educational institutions designed to serve the black people most likely to experience sexual victimization and most in need of economic opportunity, we can clearly see the case for education as a product of what Hine calls black club women’s “twin obsessions with naming and combating sexual exploitation”. I examine the case of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls to illustrate this point. Founded by the Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (an NACW subsidiary) in 1915, this was the first and only reformatory for black female juvenile delinquents in Virginia. At this school, black club women employed pedagogies meant to combat the sexual and economic exploitation of black women and girls. The stakes at this school were high; its founders sought not merely to inculcate their own middle class values in these criminalized working class black adolescent girls, but to protect girls’ bodily integrity, which was tightly linked, in their view, to their status as a highly exploited class in the labor market of Jim Crow Virginia.

Author

• Lindsey Elizabeth Jones, University of Virginia