Book Review: I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago
Abstract
AFFspaffAffilia0886-10991552-3020SAGE PublicationsSage CA: Los Angeles, CA10.1177/088610991243747310.1177_0886109912437473Book ReviewsBook Review: I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century ChicagoPanichelli MegPortland State University, Portland, OR, USA22012271117118BlairCynthia M.I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010. pp. $40.00, (hardbound). ISBN 9780226055985© SAGE Publications 20122012SAGE PublicationsAs I read, Cynthia Blair’s I’ve Got to Make My Livin’, I reflected on the history of black women’s labor in underground economies to provide for themselves and their families. My mind flipped between the past and present to think about how the intersecting oppressions of racism and sexism were and are placed on black women both in and out of the sex marketplace. This book details black women’s experiences of institutional racism and sexism that made the sex industry an accessible and appealing occupation at the turn of the century in Chicago. In this groundbreaking book, Blair deftly documents how sex workers made radical moves by embracing their identities as black women who also exchanged sex for money.Throughout the text are examples of the pressure that black women sex workers faced to conform to the “politics of respectability” (p. 87). Black women’s