Too Much to Ask: Black Women in the Era of Integration

Rating:
Summary: A long overdue and thoughtful study
Review: Higgenbotham's book provides a context for and explores the many issues and problems that I faced as a Black woman at a premdominately White University in the late 60's. I learned that my experiences were not unique and personal (as I had assumed), but rather quite typical of my peers. This book reads like my biography, and I can now understand and explain situations that were then inexplicable. I applaud Higgenbotham for her extensive and careful research and recommend this book enthusiastically. This is a history that I lived, and Dr. Higgenbotham has demonstated that it is worthy of scholarly investigation.

Rating:
Summary: Class Effects on Black Women's Education in the 1960s
Review: This is a study in which the interviewer is from the same background as the subjects. (I forgot the anthropological term for that.) In this study, Higgonbotham asks black women who went to predominantly-White, Northeastern colleges how they got there, how was it, and how did it affect their lives afterward. The book is written in a style that is scholarly but not impenetrable to non-academic readers. But here's the shocker. This book does very little comparing black women to their black male siblings or their white female peers. Most of this book compares the choices and actions of middle-class black women to working-class counterparts. Really, this book was more a labor studies text, than a women's studies or African-American studies one. Further, with the exception of the occasional mention of Patricia Hills Collins, there is no mention of black feminist/womanist thinkers. I wish too that the author didn't make up cheesy names to keep the universities attended hidden. But I enjoyed this book. I think I'm going to give it to my mother as a present. If white women can have Miriam Horn's "Rebels in White Gloves", why can't sisters have an equivalent? Though dated, this book is an excellent edition to books such as Takagi's "The Retreat from Race" and Garrod's "First Person, First Peoples" that look at the lives of people of color in elite universities.