This dissertation examines the role of Afro-Americans in the U.S. birth control movement in the years between 1918-1942. It argues that Afro-Americans of all classes not only supported the idea of birth control but were also a significant force in shaping the national birth control debate, educating their communities and delivering contraceptives to women. During a period when white advocacy of birth control became increasingly conservative, black birth control advocates advanced a broad, often radical, rationale for contraception. While the black and white communities often worked together to provide services to black women in many locations throughout the country, Afro-Americans worked independently of the national, white dominated birth control organizations. Additionally, the organizational strategies of Afro-American birth control advocates were found to be different from those of their white counterparts. The differences were due, in part, to Afro-Americans' strong community orientation, their belief in each person's right to good health and that the state should provide health care, and their nonhierarchial approach to the "professional's" relationship with other health providers and birth control users.

Settlement workers sought to reform American society in order to make it truer to its democratic ideals. They erected the seedling of modern social work, the social settlement, which uniquely combined social services and reform. Attentive to the daily concerns of their neighbors, settlement workers aimed at nothing short of total social transformation based on the revitalization of local communities. However, when black migrants from the rural South began to replace European immigrants in settlement neighborhoods during and after World War I, settlements responded by closing down completely, following their white neighbors out of the slums, conducting segregated activities, or only rarely, opening a separate branch or an independent black branch. This dissertation seeks to explain the failure of the mainstream movement to redirect its efforts toward the needs of its new black neighbors. It analyzes many settlement leaders' belief in the amorality of black individuals and the deficiency of their culture. Settlement workers attempted to put into practice what they considered a cosmopolitan world view, yet its secular, urban, and Northern biases further inhibited their understanding of black culture and religion. Their "liberalism" ironically helped stall the translation of "the settlement idea" from immigrants to blacks. While the mainstream settlement movement failed to welcome blacks, other reformers did conduct settlement work in both urban and rural black communities in the North and South. School settlements, the YWCA, and independent black settlements all embodied the settlement's marriage of social services and community revitalization. Some of this work influenced the broader movement toward civil rights and State responsibility for social welfare. Innocuous doctrines like industrial education and moralist womanhood veiled serious commitments to social change. This study describes a reform movement plagued and directed by racial tension. It provides evidence of the great impact of race on the history of the settlement movement from the Progressive Era to the 1940s, and reveals the importance of collective confrontation of issues such as racism and separatism in all efforts to bring about change in a pluralistic society.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, academies and seminaries sprang up throughout America, but these institutions excluded African Americans. Around the same time, mobs began destroying schools for African Americans in various cities and towns in the free states and territories. Aware of this struggle over black education, quite a few African American and white women began to mobilize. This dissertation asks why African American and white women joined the struggle for black education and what they thought, said, and did to advance black education at a time of heightened racial hostility in the antebellum North. Drawing on historical methods and feminist theory, this dissertation shows that women were in the vanguard of black education during the antebellum era. Some of the women studied in this dissertation are Maria Stewart, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Prudence Crandall, Hannah Barker, Laura Haviland, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Mary Miles Bibb, and Harriet Jacobs. These women educators pursued a range of initiatives, including building primary and secondary schools, establishing voluntary associations, organizing and fundraising, joining the teaching profession, and writing education-themed narratives, to secure educational opportunities for African Americans. Regardless of the particular vehicle for their educational work, some African American and white women educators organized and campaigned to promote equity in American education and to assert the changing status of African Americans in the nation. This study also situates women’s activism within the broader movement to abolish slavery, which allows for an analysis of the various discourses on African American education that circulated in the antebellum era. Following the lead of African Americans, women antislavery activists argued that education could help to overthrow the institution of slavery. Hence some women worked to build and strengthen alliances across race, gender, and class lines in order to realize a more inclusive and democratic nation. By examining women’s activism in the struggle for black education, this dissertation renders a dynamic representation of African American and white women as agents and thinkers in the fight against caste, oppression, and slavery.

This dissertation examines the impact of capitalist class transformation on African American households and community institutions during the Great Migration. The study reviews theories of rural to urban migration according to their applicability to African American migrant households. The transformation of African American households and laboring processes interacted with changes in gender and racial ideology. A historical case study of the Urban League of Pittsburgh discusses the League's racial uplift program and its implications for African American migrant households and Pittsburgh industries. The League unsuccessfully attempted to encourage black female domesticity and economic dependency on black men by encouraging wives to quit jobs and increase surplus labor within the household.