Return to search

‘Posed with the Greatest Care’: Photographic Representations of Black Women Employed by the Work Progress Administration in New Orleans, 1936-1941

For decades, scholars have debated the significance of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), emphasizing its political, economic, and artistic impact. This historiography is dominated by the accomplishments of white men. In an effort to highlight the long-neglected legions of black women who contributed to WPA projects and navigated the agency’s discriminatory practices, this paper will examine WPA operations in New Orleans where unemployment was the highest in the urban south, black women completed numerous large-scale projects, and white supremacist notions guided relief protocol. By analyzing the New Orleans WPA Photography collection, along with newspapers, government documents, and oral histories, a new perspective of the WPA emerges to illuminate the experiences of marginalized black women workers, illustrate how the legacies of slavery and effects of segregation impact black women’s employment opportunities, and highlight how black women made substantive contributions to public projects in the face of societal constraints.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uno.edu/oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-3813
Date23 May 2019
CreatorsO'Dwyer, Kathryn A.
PublisherScholarWorks@UNO
Source SetsUniversity of New Orleans
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceUniversity of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Page generated in 0.002 seconds