Chapter 8: Black Women—Winning or Losing? Revisited

Black Women—Winning or Losing? (Harris, 1991) reported the results of a narrative inquiry project that was conducted in 1990 and focused on the lives of professional African-American women who came of age in the Sixties. Each woman told her story of growing up Black and female and “making it” in America, and gave her perspective on where Black women are today— politically, economically, and socially. The underlying objective of the project was to answer a central question: Are Black women winning or losing in their struggle for genuine equality and human dignity?

The purpose of this project was to examine the realities of professional Black women as defined by the women themselves. As a Black educational feminist researcher, I paid particular attention to how the diversity dimensions of race, class, and gender intersected within specific sociohistorical and ethnocultural contexts to influence the course of each of these woman’s lives.