Further Reading and Sources

Reading Recommendations

Books

• Carson, Jenny. A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021.
• Grant, Keneshia N. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party: Black Voters and the Realignment of American Politics in the 20th Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2020.
• Hartman, Saidiyah. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
• Phillips-Cunningham, Danielle T. Putting Their Hands on Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020.
• Shaw, Stephanie J. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Weiler, Kathleen. Maria Baldwin's Worlds: A Story of Black New England and the Fight for Racial Justice. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019.

Articles and Book Chapters

• Berrey, Stephen A. “Obstacles to Freedom: Life in Jim Crow America.” In Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, edited by Hasan Kwame Jeffries, 59–72. University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.
• Boyd, Robert L. “The Great Migration to the North and the Rise of Ethnic Niches for African American Women in Beauty Culture and Hairdressing, 1910—1920.” Sociological Focus 29, no. 1 (1996): 33–45.
• Phillips, Danielle. “Cleaning Race: Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers in the Northeast United States, 1865–1930.” In U.S. Women’s History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood, edited by Leslie Brown, Jacqueline Castledine, and Anne Valk, 13–31. Rutgers University Press, 2017.
• Urban, Andrew. “Race and Reform: Domestic Service, the Great Migration, and European Quotas, 1891–1924.” In Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century, 223–58. NYU Press, 2018.
• White, Katherine J. Curtis. “Women in the Great Migration: Economic Activity of Black and White Southern-Born Female Migrants in 1920, 1940, and 1970.” Social Science History 29, no. 3 (2005): 413–55.

Primary Sources

The census data and government documents used in both the creation of the dataset and in researching the stories of individual women were accessed via Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. Individual citations, where applicable, can be found on the relevant page. Other primary sources used were newspaper articles from both the Boston Globe and Boston Herald archives, accessed via ProQuest and NewsBank, respectively.

Special acknowledgement is necessary for some of the illustrative photographs used on this site, which come from the Lower Roxbury Black History Project archives held by Northeastern University Libraries.