Suffagists, Sistahs, and Riot Grrrls

"The Moynihan Report"

Selections from The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, issued by the Department of Labor, March 1965.

Chapter 2: The Negro American Family
Nearly a quarter of Negro women living in cities who have ever married are divorced, separated, or are living apart from their husbands. . . . As a result, a very large percentage of Negro families are headed by females. While the number of such families among whites has been dropping since 1940, it has been rising among Negroes. . . . The breakdown of the Negro family has led to a startling increase in welfare dependency.

Chapter 3: The Roots of the Problem
Unquestionably [the institution of Jim Crow laws] worked against the emergence of a strong father figure. The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut. Indeed, in 19th century America, a particular type of exaggerated male boastfulness became almost a national style. Not for the Negro male. The "sassy nigger" was lynched.

The dimensions of the problems of Negro Americans are compounded by the present extraordinary growth in Negro population. . . . Negro women not only have more children but have them earlier. The Negro fertility rate overall is now 1.4 times the white, but what might be called the generation rate is 1.7 times the white.

Chapter 4: The Tangle of Pathology
At the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure. Once or twice removed, it will be found to be the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or antisocial behavior that did not establish but now serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation.

The Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of America, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male. . . . Ours is a society which presumes male leadership in private and public affairs. The arrangements of society facilitate such leadership and reward it. A subculture, such as that of the Negro American, in which this is not the pattern, is placed at a distinct disadvantage.

A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife. . . . In 44 pewrcent of the Negro families studied, the wife was dominant, as against 20 percent of the white wives. Whereas the majority of white families are equalitarian, the largest percentage of Negro families are dominated by the wife.

For a long while Negro females were better educated than Negro males. . . . However, the gap is closing. By October 1964, there were slightly more Negro men in college than women. Among whites there were almost twice as many men as women enrolled.

Negro females have established a strong position for themselves in white collar and professional employment. . . . Where special efforts have been made to insure equal employment opportunity for Negroes, . . . it may well be that these efforts have redounded mostly to the benefit of Negro women.

The testimony to the effects of these patterns in Negro family structure is widespread and hardly to be doubted: