Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars

By Anastasia C. Curwood

The so-called New Negroes of the period between World Wars I and II embodied a new sense of racial pride and upward mobility for the race. Many of them thought that relationships between spouses could be a crucial factor in realizing this dream. But there was little agreement about how spousal relationships should actually function in an ideal New Negro marriage. Shedding light on an often-overlooked aspect of African American social history, Anastasia Curwood explores the public and private negotiations over gender relationships inside marriage that consumed upwardly mobile black Americans between 1918 and 1942.

Curwood uses private correspondence between spouses, including her own grandparents, and public writings from leading figures of the era to investigate African Americans' deepest hopes within their private lives. She follows changes and conflicts in African American marital ideals--and demonstrates how those ideals sometimes clashed with reality. In the process, Curwood shows how New Negro marriages are an especially rich site for assessing the interactions of racial, class, and gender identities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9780807868386

Anastasia C. Curwood

Anastasia C. Curwood is professor of history and co-founder of the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of Stormy Weather: Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars.

Book preview

STORMY WEATHER

STORMY WEATHER

Middle-Class African American Marriages between the Two World Wars

Anastasia C. Curwood

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2010 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved. Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Merlo with hand-drawn title and Bello and The Sans display by Rebecca Evans. Manufactured in the United States of America. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of

the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Curwood, Anastasia Carol, 1974–

Stormy weather: middle-class African American marriages between

the two world wars / by Anastasia C. Curwood.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3434-3 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-0981-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Marriage. 2. African American families.

3. United States—History—1919–1933. I. Title.

E185.86.C987 2010 305.896’073—dc22 2010018365

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

paper 17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

For Mom and Dad

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 FROM UPLIFT TO NEW NEGRO MARRIAGES

Changing Ideals of Sexuality and Activism in African American Marriages, 1890–1940

2 NEW NEGRO HUSBANDS

3 NEW NEGRO WIVES

4 THE EVERYDAY CHALLENGES OF UPWARD MOBILITY

Class Identity and Married Couples

5 LOVE AND TROUBLE IN INTERWAR MARRIAGES

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Harlem Renaissance men, 1924 61

Hilda Wilkinson Brown, In the House of the Mother67

Hilda Wilkinson Brown, In the House of the Father69

E. Franklin Frazier and Marie Brown Frazier, later in life 112

Sarah Thomas Curwood, ca. 1940 125

James Lawrence Curwood, ca. 1940 130

Katherine and Robert Flippin, 1939 144

Acknowledgments

This project began many years ago when I found a box of my grandparents’ letters from their courtship and early months of marriage. As a young history major, I was thrilled that my own family had participated in the historical events I studied in my courses. Since then, I have been at work on this project in one way or another. Because Stormy Weather has been a book long in the making, countless supporters have made it possible. I mention here some of those colleagues, friends, and family who have helped it come into being.

Researching a world as private as that of marriage has been a challenge, but it has been eased by the wonderful staff of several archives. The people working at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University are uniformly helpful and friendly; I look forward to every visit. The efforts of the staff—Dr. Ida Jones, Joellen El-Bashir, Lela Sewell-Ward, and Donna Wells—were invaluable to my work. I also found help at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; from Kathy Kraft and Kathy Jacobs at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University; from Beth Howse at the Fisk University Library; from Nancy Miller at the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Record Center; and at the Auburn Avenue Research Library, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System.

At the beginning stages of this project, I was mentored by Shan Holt at Bryn Mawr College and Emma Lapsansky at Haverford College. When I reached Princeton University, I had the great fortune to have Nell Irvin Painter as an advisor. An excellent reader and editor, not to mention a gifted historian, Nell had tremendous faith in the importance of this study. Her rigorous interrogations of my analyses forced me to ask difficult questions and explore ideas that went beyond conventional historical wisdom. Christine Stansell, Deborah Gray White of Rutgers University–New Brunswick, and social psychologist Deborah Prentice made important interventions that greatly improved the project. Other faculty who provided feedback or encouragement include Dirk Hartog, Kevin Kruse, Liz Lunbeck, Colin Palmer, and Deborah Nord. Helpful colleagues included Ma-linda Lindquist and Belinda Gonzalez, Meri Clark, Karen Caplan, Jolie Dyl, Crystal Feimster, Dani Botsman, Victoria Klein, Cheryl Hicks, Chad Williams, Anore Horton, Felicia Kornbluh, Sam Roberts, and Keith Mayes. I am also grateful for the support I received from Princeton’s Graduate School, the Department of History, and the Program in African-American Studies, all of which provided valuable research assistance for the project.

As a new faculty member, I have been welcomed warmly into the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University, where I have found unparalleled research resources and collegial support. Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting and Gilman Whiting took an interest in my work at an early date and have continued to be extremely supportive as I have completed it. Tiffany Patterson, Victor Anderson, Rosanne Adderley, Karen Campbell, Dana Nelson, and Susan Kuyper have provided crucial advice at crucial times. Tara Williams’s administrative support has been similarly indispensable. Undergraduate research assistant Nattaly Perryman transcribed many of the Curwoods’ letters. I have also been helped generously by my colleagues in the Global Feminisms Collaborative, in the Department of History, and at the Culture and Creativity Workshop at the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Early in my academic career I benefited from the hospitality of Alan Rogers and my colleagues in the Department of History at Boston College.

Important research assistance has come from the Mellon Foundation and the Social Science Research Council in the form of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate/University Fellowship, from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s dissertation and Career Enhancement Fellowships, from the Ford Foundation’s Postdoctoral Diversity Fellowship, and from Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science. I have gained not only financial assistance for research, which has been essential, but also access to a wide network of colleagues through all of these foundations. I cannot name all of my Ford and Mellon family members individually, but they have been a very important source of energy and feedback for this project.

Sian Hunter of the University of North Carolina Press took an early interest in this project and has patiently waited for its completion, encouraging me the entire time. The anonymous reviewers for the University of North Carolina Press read and generously commented on this manuscript, thereby making it into a much better book. Other colleagues who have given their time to this project include Gina Hiatt and the Professors’ Writing Group, Davarian Baldwin, Ernie Chavez, Leslie Harris, Jonathan Holloway, Tera Hunter, Franklin Knight, Michele Mitchell, Clement Price, Christina Simmons, Judith Smith, and Ula Taylor. Helen Snively provided essential editorial assistance. Earlier versions of parts of Chapter 2 appeared in the Du Bois Review and AmeriQuests, and I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for those journals.

Family and friends who have little involvement or interest in academia have sustained me nonetheless. I am grateful for support from Lainey Johnson, Diana and Adrian Huns, Catherine Archibald, Heather Gillette, Elizabeth Te Selle, Amy Wise, Annika Kramer, and Gail Seavey. Some of my family walk on four legs and have provided thousands of hours of their own kind of support: Zippy, Leo, Scout, Crescent, Hazel, and Taco the Wonder Horse. My aunt, Sarah E. Curwood, started me down this road when she gave me my grandmother’s letters almost ten years ago and has encouraged me ever since. My paternal grandmother, Sarah T. Curwood, who passed away in 1990, unwittingly provided the original inspiration for this project and modeled the life of a scholar and teacher. I also wish to thank Elnora Thomas Skelton, Susan and Charles Beckers, Ken Brown, Jennifer Stevens, and John Kellam. My brother James Alexander Curwood fixed my computer and read drafts. My parents, Wendy Zens and Steve Curwood, to whom this book is dedicated, have been my biggest supporters over more than three decades. They have modeled invaluable skills of determination, curiosity, open-mindedness, balance, and analysis and have helped me at every stage of this project. Finally, I am extremely lucky to have Carol Skricki as a life partner. She has walked alongside me through multiple stages of this project and has given bountifully of her support and encouragement. Thank you all.

STORMY WEATHER

Introduction

In July 1937, James and Sarah Curwood had an argument. The young African Americans had recently celebrated their first anniversary. But marital bliss seemed elusive just then. Sarah’s new volunteer job at Boston’s South End Settlement House, as a researcher on the labor concerns of African Americans, bothered James, a house servant on a summer estate one hour south of the city. For one thing, she represented herself as unmarried and lived with a group of other young researchers in the settlement house. And she was too busy to clean the rooms the couple rented in a boardinghouse, so that on his days off he encountered a mess. Second, she met and associated with people he did not know, and he preferred that he knew every one of her acquaintances, especially the men. But perhaps most disturbing was Sarah’s ambition to get a permanent job at South End House and then return to school for an advanced degree. Instead, James wanted her to work as a domestic servant to pay off the couple’s bills, including her education loans.

When she had enrolled at Cornell University four years earlier, Sarah had likely hoped that such an education would provide her a ticket out of domestic service. She had developed an interest in economics and race relations and graduated a semester early with her Phi Beta Kappa key. The position with South End House’s Boston Summer Lab represented a good career move into the expanding world of African American professionalized race work. But James’s dissatisfaction grew. At first he bargained with her: if she followed his plan for her (presumably a solely domestic role—in his house or that of an employer), he would be willing to put her through graduate school the following year. But he soon became frustrated. When you came to Boston, he wrote, did you not forget all about your promise and began to live according to your own precepts[?] Instead of cleaning you made excuses; instead of conducting yourself as I forestated I wished, you did as you pleased and ridiculed my ideas as being old fashioned and out-moded. Lamenting that Sarah thought housework beneath her, James angrily declared, If college can dehumanize a person as much as it has you, I pray God will guide me away from such a place forever! Finally, he stated what he thought her problem was: Although married you demand the same freedom of unmarried women.¹

This argument blew over, but the tension over marital roles in the Curwoods’ marriage never did. Sarah continued to pursue graduate work in education, and James was never comfortable with it. In addition, James’s violent behavior and substance abuse eventually culminated in his suicide and Sarah’s single parenting of their two children.

In the mid-1990s, I discovered the story of the Curwoods, my paternal grandparents, through several hundred letters that they had exchanged between 1935 and 1949, the bulk of which were written in 1935–37. Most of the letters document their courtship and early years of marriage, although there was a flurry of correspondence in the mid-1940s when James was in the navy. They also corresponded with other family members. My aunt, Sarah E. Curwood, found the letters in the attic of the New Hampshire farmhouse that Sarah had purchased shortly after James’s death. My grandmother Sarah had died in 1990.

As I began to read through the boxes of correspondence, I instantly became immersed in the world of the Curwoods. I immediately noticed that although they were both African American, in every other respect they came from two different worlds. My grandmother was raised in a middle-class family in upstate New York, while my grandfather had grown up poor in Texas and then, at age fourteen, migrated north. Each had very different expectations when it came to the behavior of their spouse. Yet their shared enterprise showed me something else that captivated my historian’s instincts: their story was simultaneously both deeply individual and inextricably connected with the historical context of their time and place. I found myself drawn to the drama of this young couple, laid bare in the letters that they likely intended for no one but the other to see. Their conflict and the intricacies of their intimacy make a compelling story of love, heartbreak, and human experience. But I was also aware of how much their personal story was situated in a matrix of race, class, gender, and sexuality, all within the context of a northern city in the 1930s.

In this light, James’s anger that Sarah was spending time with people he did not know represents both the content of their marital conflict and the differences between their ideas of appropriate gender roles. Sarah’s refusal to enter domestic service was a source of personal frustration for both spouses, but it was also the product of her awareness that African American women were exploited in such jobs and his understanding that domestic service was a job that most women took on when they needed money. The material and social conditions that surrounded the Curwoods pervaded the deepest, most personal aspects of their relationship.

While this book contains the stories of a range of married couples and a multiplicity of opinions on marriage, my grandparents’ story has remained central to my inquiry. Their story appears in two later chapters of the book. What informs and grounds my entire analysis is my discovery that my own grandparents simultaneously confronted both their own struggles for marital intimacy and their status as upwardly mobile African Americans in a highly racist society. They showed me that, while marriage is an intimate relationship, it is also one to which each spouse brings his or her own social and cultural status and aspirations. This book shows that, for middle-class or aspiring middle-class African American couples, marital relationships were interwoven with both public and private pressures, which sometimes existed in tension with one another. African Americans could not escape the effects of racial and gendered power relationships, but they were nonetheless in private relationships that reflected the individual humanity of the participants. Throughout the book, I demonstrate how the public-private tension played out in many arenas, including racial identity, class identity, gender roles, the emerging social sciences, northern and urban migration, economics, and sexuality during the period between World Wars I and II.

BETWEEN THE WARS, American society faced a period of cultural upheaval, one that African Americans could hardly escape. Within the crosscurrents of evolving social and cultural norms, black people such as my grandparents sought both to fit into larger society and to define themselves on their own terms. African Americans who were newly urban, northern, and midwestern were especially consumed with how, by living up to class and gender role ideals, they could improve the standing of the race.

It was in marriage that these ideals converged, both in public and in private. But living up to class and gender ideals through marriage was virtually impossible, in no small part because African Americans were aiming at a moving target. Several factors kept that target moving. First, sexual and marital norms in America as a whole had changed rapidly during and after World War I. Although the nickname The Roaring Twenties is simplistic, it does reflect many realities: urbanization, new sexual freedoms, the rise of youth culture, equal rights, feminism, and artistic innovation. Books, films, and magazines debated the role of marriage in modern times.

Starting in the 1890s but intensifying in the 1920s, spouses began to expect more emotional fulfillment from their marriages. This new emotional expectation extended to sexual fulfillment: sex was not merely for reproduction but should provide spouses with pleasure and intimacy. Also, the divisions between men’s and women’s marital roles became less stark. In the twentieth century, women continued to expand their status in political and economic arenas.² Some African Americans, like some white Americans, disapproved of these new trends. Given the ideals of restrained sexuality that had animated many black political voices at the turn of the century, African Americans sometimes saw the experiments with new gender and sexual roles as dangerous to the race’s public relations.

As the interwar period continued, economic depression further destabilized the gender lines that black and white Americans alike had worked so hard to draw. The Great Depression was a period of crisis and flux in the economy as well as in gender relations. Fighting back, some black men began to theorize that women and wives ought to prioritize work inside the home and refrain from participation in paid work or public culture. If men’s rightful place was at the head of the household, then women needed to take note of the destructive force that their economic and political autonomy had on the natural gendered state of things. In the 1930s, that social groundwork of less rigid gender roles laid in the 1910s and 1920s met the economic reality of male unemployment and underemployment. Although ideals had not always matched reality in the 1920s, the disparity became even more glaring in the 1930s.

Second, African Americans migrated to cities like New York and Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s. As they developed new, more assertive political and cultural ideas, they coined a term for themselves: New Negroes. New Negroes emerged out of the energy of this Great Migration, the name often given to the movement of black Americans from the rural South to the urban South and North. New migrants brought new perspectives and ideas. In particular, New York’s Harlem was a center of innovation and activity. In the 1910s and 1920s, New Negroes creatively blended the old and the new, the rural and the urban.³

New geographic mobility occurred alongside new modes of class mobility. Although older ideals of uplifting the race through bourgeois respectability began to fade, becoming a refined member of the middle class was still a worthy goal. Middle class, in the case of early-twentieth-century African Americans, was a subjective status linked to cultural identity at least as much as it was to objective indicators of economic status. For a race that experienced pervasive economic discrimination, noneconomic elements were part of class identity. Furthermore, the middle class was evolving. Membership in the middle class had been, before the Great Migration, based on elite ancestry and adherence to Victorian cultural norms. Especially after World War I, income, wealth, and occupation provided middle-class status, and membership in one of the Old Families was far less important. Many of these new professionals and entrepreneurs found a market niche serving segregated communities.

Still, both old and new versions of the black middle class shared a basic element: distinguishing themselves from the black working class and poor.⁴ New middle-class black people still, like their older counterparts, sought to counteract perennial stereotypes that equated blackness with hypersexuality. Their definition of middle class combined both economic status and sexual behavior. As a result, ideal masculinity and feminine behavior became very important to upwardly mobile New Negroes. Using the outlets available to them in print, they glorified self-sufficient or even militant masculinity and supportive, soft femininity. The reward for adhering to combined gender and class standards of decorum was earning the status of being a credit to one’s race.

Third and finally, black people themselves were not of one mind in defining an ideal marriage. Many were concerned about the past and continuing racial assumptions that their own people held about marriage and black sexual deviance. Others urged that the old marriage ideals be modernized, by empowering either black men or black women or by granting more importance to romantic love and sexuality.

ALTHOUGH, or perhaps because, my family participated in creating a New Negro marriage, I find the story of interwar African American marriages compelling for its own sake. Gender roles and racial thinking underwent tremendous change and scrutiny in the interwar period. How to choose a marriage partner, how to behave as a husband or a wife, and how to use marriage as a supportive institution for the New Negro project—these were consuming issues for the people who walk these pages. The fact that both public and private factors were in play when New Negroes attempted to resolve these matters meant that sometimes reality did not match ideals. This discontinuity required actual couples to adapt, part, or sometimes create their own marital ideals. Most used a combination of these strategies to negotiate the intersection of history and subjectivity.

However, because African American marriages were often complex and contradictory,⁵ they have attracted little scholarly attention, especially during the period between 1925 and 1960. The 1960s saw the beginning of an explosion of scholarship on black families, much of it in response to a perceived