Much has been written on Chicago's African American community. However, I've Got to Make My Livin’ reveals that new avenues of inquiry can be found. Cynthia Blair focusses on black women's sex work at the turn of the twentieth century. This is placed effectively within the context of mass urbanization (particularly in the case of Chicago), the reform movements of the Progressive era, and the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to cities in the North. The book charts the changes that took place in the city's sex economy between the 1880s and the 1920s, an era typified in the history of American race relations by Jim Crow segregation and mass immigration. Fundamentally, it reveals that black sex workers “embodied the tensions in turn-of-the-century society” (12) – those existing in sexual, gendered and racial terms. Indeed, this study adds weight to the argument that sexuality remained a potent tension in race relations during this period, as it had done during slavery and in the post-emancipation South.

Blair's work focusses on the city's South Side, exploring how black women were historical actors in their own right. Whilst exploitation was plainly evident, Blair argues that sex work provided black women with a means of resisting middle-class values – be they sexual, economic, or otherwise. Even so, as Blair argues, these black women were never removed from the values from which they came, and black women's involvement in the sex economy was “a constant negotiation of working-class notions of respectability, individual self-respect, and economic self-reliance” (11). Furthermore, Blair points out that despite the chance of providing independence and a new life, this was a harsh life – keeping quiet about what they did for a living to family; ostracism from society; and the ever-present risk of becoming pregnant, contracting disease, or being a victim of physical abuse. New challenges emerged as time went on. By the time of the First World War, black sex workers were facing a harsher situation – being the target of the local police and the courts, and under the control of black businessmen.

One feature of this book that links this study to older debates in African American history is the way in which Blair integrates into her study reaction from black community leaders, and in particular, reaction from the emerging black middle class. Black leaders were often silent on the subject of black women's sex work. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his study on the African Americans in Philadelphia, for example, was a case in point. However, reaction from the black community to the sex economy could never be divorced from historical memory, Blair argues, for the memory of sexual abuse and continuing sexual violence against black women provided a potent reason for community leaders to fight against this economy.

More broadly, Blair reveals one of the key issues that faces any historian of turn-of-the-century African American history: the lack of sources. However, a look at the bibliography reveals that Blair has covered all the usual bases with ease, such as newspapers and the census. In addition, police department reports have also been consulted, which provide a fascinating insight into another side of Chicago. This study, therefore, provides the reader with a comprehensive insight into black women's involvement in Chicago's sex economy, strengthening further the significance of black agency in the era of Jim Crow. I've Got to Make My Livin’ will certainly become, if it is not already, the standard work on black women's sex work in Chicago.