Nicole M. Brown takes a deep dive into Chicago’s welfare, women’s, and consumer rights movements to illuminate the leadership and strategizing of Black women during the 1960s and 1970s. As a historical sociologist, she argues for the relevance of history to understanding the contemporary conditions of Black women confronting poverty, as well as making targeted historical arguments about Chicago and the welfare rights movement. The overall point of these historical arguments is that Black women in the movement “deployed sophisticated strategies of political consumerism” that have been missed or misunderstood by previous scholars (2).Brown uses three theoretical frameworks for her analysis. She contends that intersectional analytics expose the ways systems, institutions, and archives obscure and erase Black women’s political understandings and their efforts at improving the lives of their households and communities. Intersections of racism, sexism, and classism also worked to undermine potential alliances between white and middle-class activists and poor Black women. Brown introduces a second theoretical framework she calls realms of power, derived from Pierre Bourdieu and Patricia Hill Collins, and sets it within the concept of intersectional political consumerism to describe how power is negotiated and influenced by social locations in the consumerist settings. For the third framework, Brown categorizes and describes Black women’s activism “as analogous to technology,” specifically to concepts of computer science with an emphasis on parallel computing, algorithms, code, and end users (20).The book starts with an introduction that serves two purposes: to explain her theoretical frameworks and to outline her interventions. Brown states that she fills a gap in previous scholarship where sociologists have oversimplified Black women’s strategies and focused too much on questions of class or on specific individuals. Through their communal organizations, Brown argues, Black women fought for the dignity of their communities and “defined themselves as consumers before industry would come to accept and monopolize on their existence as a consumer bloc” (19). The first chapter, “Harvest,” continues Brown’s discussion of her methods to delineate both her computer science analogy and the importance of intersectionality. She also historicizes her scholarship with references to labor and welfare historians such as Annelise Orleck, Premilla Nadasen, and Traci Parker, with special attention to Felicia Kornbluh.The next three chapters of We Are Each Other’s Business advance chronologically and conceptually through the 1960s and 1970s. Brown examines two case studies: TWO (the Woodlawn Organization) and JOIN (Jobs or Income Now). She argues that their different ideologies drove their decisions to engage in different types of intersectional political consumerism. Brown also argues that Black women sought to “repurpose” consumer credit by shifting it away from a middle-class neoliberal identification that served the dismantling of welfare. Brown then turns to the ways consumerism has been deployed by the state and corporations to institutionalize neoliberal economic policies and identities. She argues that these efforts, not Black women’s strategic demands about credit and consumer access, commodified the poor and solidified notions of who deserved certain goods.For labor scholars, the exploration of Chicago archives is a great strength of We Are Each Other’s Business. Brown uses well-known collections, including the George Wiley Papers and the Chicago Urban League, but reads them for the collective tactics of poor Black women. She contrasts the Chicago Welfare Rights Organization (CWRO) with the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) and connects these to local campaigns by the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, the Chicago Archdiocesan Committee on Poverty, and the Self-Help Action Center. In chapter 3, Brown also provides an insightful discussion of the shift from “customer to consumer” and government agencies’ increasing intercession in the relationship between consumers and industry (92–106). Table 3.1 is a concise chronology of consumer education and rights legislation during the 1960s and 1970s. As a result, consumers had some right to expect fair business practices. This discussion sets up her revisionist history of the NWRO’s Sears Credit Campaign and boycott of Sears Corporation, which is the core of the book.The local history and centering of Black women from Chicago in the Sears campaigns are important contributions to US women’s history and the history of welfare. Brown joins historians such as Orleck and Marisa Chappell in redirecting the scholarly approach to women, poverty, and the so-called welfare state. The computer science analogy was most effective in highlighting aspects of political economy. When she describes the Nixon administration’s welfare policies as “analog algorithms of poverty because of their static rigidity and standardizing of poverty terms and outcomes,” the constriction of computer code suits her point (153). I recognize that poor Black women’s activisms were clearly “technologies” in the sense of being innovative and sophisticated. But as a historian of recent US history who tracks the intensifying dominance of IT in imaginings and meaning-making, for me the women’s creativity, savvy, and determination also speak to a profound artistry.We Are Each Other’s Business makes a significant contribution regarding Black women’s demand for economic rights untied to their employment status—particularly their rights to middle-class consumer tools such as credit. The theoretical frameworks are provocative for discussions with upper-level and graduate students, and the stories of local organizations and alternative analysis of the NWRO and Sears campaigns would be interesting to all students. Brown argues that the epistemic violence of the archives attempted to silence and erase these poor Black women and their collective local groups, and this book provides a clear act of recovery.
Aimee Loiselle (Fri,) studied this question.