RECOVERING AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S “HIDDEN” LABOR RESISTANCE IN THE ARCHIVE

In this chapter, the author will explore the methodological process of conducting transdisciplinary feminist research about African American women’s labor histories. Dominant conceptualizations of “worker” and “labor organizing” traditionally center the stories of white male industrial workers and their labor unions. This framing renders invisible African American women who resisted worker exploitation outside of labor unions that refused to address racism and women’s working conditions. With no union representation or legal protections, African American women and girls were regularly subjected to dangerous working conditions and low-wage jobs during the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. In response to this situation, in 1909, Nannie Helen Burroughs established the National Training School for Women and Girls to improve Black women’s working and living conditions. The author documents how she has employed transdisciplinary feminist methodologies to uncover evidence of Burroughs’ historic and expansive organizing against labor injustices that is buried inside archival sources that are not commonly associated with labor resistance.