While early works in the nascent field of critical age studies tended to center white texts,Footnote 1 more recent work acknowledges and analyzes the crucial intersections between age and race ideologies. The more theoretical works often connect Simone de Beauvoir’s conceptual framework of aging as a process of personal and societal “othering” to postcolonial theory and critical race studies.Footnote 2 Such approaches help to make visible the operations of race in ideologies of age, which work as complex and multifaceted discourses that construct relations between diverse aging bodies to maintain structural inequalities. In more recent book-length studies, scholars chart how race, gender, and age have intersected historically and in literature to constitute citizenship, rights, and visibility. Several of these works focus specifically on Black elders, Black girlhood, and Black childhood.Footnote 3 But Black midlife has remained relatively under-studied. Here, through close engagement with the later work by canonical white author Charlotte Perkins Gilman and a less well-known Black writer and teacher of the Harlem Renaissance, Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer, this essay aims to theorize Black female midlife, what age study scholar Margaret Gullette termed “postmaternal woman,” to better understand aging as a highly racialized terrain.Footnote 4
For a myriad of reasons, from the uneven and often inaccurate information in plantation records to the practice of keeping birth dates from enslaved people, and the prolonged exploitation, poverty, and disenfranchisement through the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, chronological ages for Black men and women were often difficult to ascertain.Footnote 5 This does not mean, however, that stages of life are not signaled in Black writing,Footnote 6 or that race is not an important and often overlooked factor in the literature of aging more generally. While nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Black women’s writing was less focussed on middle age as a distinct stage of life, their writings do carve out a place for postmaternal women that is intimately tied to racial progress and economic independence outside domestic work. White women’s age narratives, on the other hand, are very often tied to constructions of racial hierarchies and white supremacy. Thus arguments about the “value” of postmaternal middle-aged women are also inevitably arguments about the complex interactions of gender and race. White women’s narratives on aging need to be investigated for the ways in which racial ideologies inform constructs of “successful aging,”Footnote 7 while Black women’s narratives on race need to be investigated for the ways in which ideologies of age inform constructs of successful racial identity and multigenerational ties.Footnote 8 This article will first look briefly at the history of women’s age consciousness in the early and mid-nineteenth century and then move to the early twentieth century to compare how Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Gertrude Elise McDougald Ayer use race in distinctly different and revealing ways to stake out a place for older women in the social order.
While many age studies scholars have focussed on the early twentieth century as the moment when cultural and literary interest in middle-aged women gained traction, Corinne T. Field’s The Struggle for Equal Adulthood and Sari Edelstein’s Adulthood and Other Fictions argue that chronological age became an important tool, both politically and narratively, in the early nineteenth century.Footnote 9 Field in particular argues that antebellum women activists worked to claim access to narratives of development and maturity that had recently become the basis for white male power beginning in the Jacksonian period. Following this white and male trajectory, Field argues that “woman’s rights activists sought to redefine womanhood as a stage of life characterized by independence and individual development.”Footnote 10 A good example of the assumed whiteness in these discussions is Pauline Wright Davis’s speech at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention. In it, she calls attention to the over-idealization of girls and young women, arguing that it leads to “valuing ‘girlish beauty’ and ‘entire dependence’ as the height of femininity,” thus creating the “peak” of a woman’s life “while she was yet a child.” This meant that “later stages of life could bring only decline and disappointment.”Footnote 11 Using Davis, Field concludes that “woman had only two routes into middle age – neither very appealing. She could become ‘the heartless votary of fashion, a flirt, or that most to be dreaded, most to be despised thing – a married coquette.’”Footnote 12 In response to this, white women worked to construct middle age as a time of individualistic fulfillment, and a moment of liberation from the “entire dependence” of both her early and maternal years.
It is easy to see why such arguments did not speak to Black women. While Black activists argued that age should be used to measure development for Black men and women, the life course for Black women could not be “staged” in the way that white women defined it. Certainly, there had been no girlhood in which their beauty and purity were extolled.Footnote 13 And the “dependence” on men that white women activists sought to challenge through the idea of growing maturity with chronological age, especially in their postmaternal years, was out of sync with Black women’s experience. As summed up by historian Mia Bay, Black women “worked as hard as men, received no protection from sexual exploitation and assault, and were branded immoral, unwomanly, and naturally lewd, largely as a result of the condition in which they were forced to live.”Footnote 14 Moreover, with Black women working from “the cradle to the grave,” stages of life were indeed much harder to parse.Footnote 15
And yet it was not impossible. Black activist Maria W. Stewart used age and life stage in much of her work during the antebellum period to challenge the narrative of Black lives as undifferentiated toil. And she called on middle-aged men and women to do their part to help the younger generation. Stewart herself was also an early author of literature for and about Black children.Footnote 16 Thus her work uses the frame of age and life stages to argue against pseudoscientific discourses on race that both limited the very idea of Black maturation and connected Black children with deviance.Footnote 17 For example, Stewart’s story “The First Stage of Life” (1861), published in the Black magazine Repository of Religion and Literature, centers on the responsibility of older men and women to teach Black children and ultimately instill in them “self-governing behavior.” According to Nazera Sadiq Wright, Stewart’s story “emphasizes communal networks and suggests that the protection of the nuclear family was perhaps unattainable for many Black girls in the antebellum period.”Footnote 18 Stewart spoke often of the larger community that would raise and protect Black children, and that included, explicitly, middle-aged women and men: “God has wisely arranged that the old and the middle-aged, by their wisdom and discretion, should counsel and guide the young.”Footnote 19 This argument and others like it from Stewart defined not only Black childhood as a life stage, but also the multiple adult stages through which Black subjecthood developed. Her inclusion of older subjects rejects racist claims that Black maturation stopped in early adolescence.Footnote 20 Stewart understood that referencing different life stages was an important anti-racist tool at any age.
This network of older and middle-aged Black men and women were not only called on to help raise Black children. Stewart, like McDougald after her, also saw a distinct (if thwarted) role for middle-aged men and women to help free northern Blacks of the younger generation find paying work. In a speech delivered at Boston’s Franklin Hall in 1832, Stewart bemoans the sad sight of seeing “our middle-aged men, clad in their rusty plaids and coats,” and pointedly asks Black men to do more to press “the legislature for mercy’s sake to grant you all the rights and privileges of free citizens, [so] that your daughters may rise to that degree of respectability which true merit deserves, and your sons above the servile situation which most of them fill.”Footnote 21 Stewart’s frustration with the inability of middle-aged men – who have not moved beyond manual labor, as their plaid work shirts indicate – to advocate for the younger generation uses the discourse of age to push for intergenerational progress. Stewart also remarks on her own advocacy for younger Black women and girls, noting in her speech that she has asked white women whether it were not possible “providing our girls were to give them the most satisfactory references … to grant them an equal opportunity with others?” In disappointment, Stewart says that “the answer was invariably that while they may not object to it themselves, they would be in danger of losing public patronage” if they hired Black girls.Footnote 22 Thus perhaps one of the most obvious differences between Stewart’s arguments and the arguments made by white women activists in the antebellum period is the emphasis on the promises of individualistic freedoms versus the urgent need for intergenerational responsibility. As we shall see, these paths continue to diverge along similar lines in early twentieth-century writings that include women in their postmaternal years.
Freedom and individualism: Gilman’s vision for white women at midlife
When we turn to the early twentieth century, we see the emphasis on individual freedom and exploration in white discourses of postmaternal life come into sharper focus in the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In her writing, Gilman strove, like white women before her, to construct middle age as a moment to break free from serving husband and family and “realize at last her individual character as a human creature.”Footnote 23 Gilman’s advocacy for the social, economic, and political usefulness of middle-aged white women sought to define “marriage and motherhood as a distinct phase of a woman’s life rather than her entire destiny.”Footnote 24 She argues that her years of domestic responsibilities yielded great wisdom, making middle-aged women promising entrepreneurs and natural leaders.Footnote 25 However (also like other white women activists before her), Gilman rests her argument on a race science that continued to define nonwhites as inherently childlike, thus using race to propel white women’s power while denying Black women the narrative of development through age.Footnote 26 That is, she uses whiteness as a raft of “sameness” in the racial hierarchies of the time to earn a place of privilege for middle-aged white women.
Gilman’s interest in middle-aged women is clear in her later fiction, especially What Diantha Did (serialized in 1909 and 1910) and Herland (1915).Footnote 27 But well before that, Gilman sets up the idea of an economically independent older women in Women and Economics (1898). While much of the book focusses on the marriage market, she argues that women should have at least “twenty-five years more after … maternal service,” and that any duties toward family in later years should not be “alleged as preventing economic independence.”Footnote 28 In Gilman’s later essays, discussed below, the focus turns to those years after “maternal service.”
Early in the twentieth century, Gilman published two versions of an essay she entitled “The Woman of Fifty.” The first version was published in Success magazine in 1908 and the second in 1911 in her own magazine, Forerunner, which Gilman began publishing at the age of fifty. The two versions have some interesting differences. Most importantly, the later version is more overt in its eugenic agenda. Both, however, rely heavily on previous women’s rights activists’ argument that white women grow and mature with age and in doing so have much to offer both the country and their race in their more independent postmaternal years. In addition, in both essays, Gilman relies heavily on notions of selfhood, individualism, and “humanhood” that require a Western hegemonic equation of whiteness with personhood. As Sari Edelstein notes, Gilman “specifically saw female independence as essential to white racial futurity, gesturing to the ways that constructions of maturity shored up racial hierarchy.”Footnote 29
In “The Woman of Fifty,” Gilman’s ideal subject has had a successful marriage and raised multiple children. It is only after “the great common experience of love, marriage, and maternity” has been accomplished that she is eligible for a more independent middle age.Footnote 30 The women who are thus entitled can only then attend to their own “personalities” or “souls.”Footnote 31 Pointedly, Gilman sees these years as broader and more meaningful than what younger women could experience. Younger women, she writes, lose time “in making mistakes and gaining costly experience.”Footnote 32 Older women, on the other hand, already have “years of ripe wisdom” and are “strong, rich, well-balanced, unhampered by the predominant egotism of youth.”Footnote 33 Gilman adds that these older years are the ones that can “yield rich, and sure returns” both economically and personally.Footnote 34 This line of thinking is reinforced by her choice to publish her first iteration of “The Woman of Fifty” in Success magazine, a publication that championed entrepreneurial projects.Footnote 35 For Gilman, life stages and economics were clearly connected, and in the postmaternal woman she saw a tantalizing way out of the oppressive “family economy” that she critiqued in Women and Economics. Importantly, however, and in sharp contrast to what we will find in McDougald’s writing, most of the jobs that Gilman suggested for postmaternal women were based on their domestic skills, though now outside the family economy and thus able to provide women with their own income.Footnote 36
But income independence is not the only prize for postmaternal women. In detailing the different types of entrepreneurial ventures that women could start (including laundry services, restaurants, boarding houses, and coffee shops), Gilman makes note of the “natural excitement and stimulus of new undertakings; and the growing delight of being useful to an ever-widening range of people.”Footnote 37 Moreover, these ventures become a kind of fountain of youth. As Gilman goes on to argue, such profit-making ventures will keep her subject young: “In this adventure she is no longer fifty, nor forty, nor any age. She is eternally young.”Footnote 38 Individualism, entrepreneurship, freedom from family, and youthfulness thus animate her argument for white middle-aged women’s active engagement in the world.Footnote 39 Such women’s ability to “yield rich, and sure returns” is based on their acquired wisdom, and, at the same time, becomes a recipe for retaining youthfulness. In making this type of argument, then, Gilman sidesteps many of the problems of aging altogether.
More importantly, while Gilman’s portrait of the woman of fifty is exciting and liberatory for her specific subject, she purchases this freedom (and visibility) for older women by defining them, especially in the Forerunner piece, as the highest representatives of the race, in terms both of race itself and connectedly of gender:
But now comes the new view, showing that woman is in reality, the race type … In the old view men were the people and women the sex; in the new view women are the people and men the sex. Now observe the change as it applies to the woman of fifty. The woman, the race type, spends part of her life in being a female – and outgrows it; she then becomes human, pure human, the only pure human type for men do not outgrow the disabilities of sex till far later … The new woman now finds that after “womanhood” is ended, “humanhood” begins, and that being human is a far larger, longer, more interesting field of life than being woman.Footnote 40
In this configuration, personhood is associated with race over gender/sex. Gilman makes an argument for middle-aged women’s usefulness by connecting it to whiteness by way of “purity” and a post-gender/sex ideal that has specific consequences for narratives of aging. While Black women were “increasingly identified as the root cause of the failings of their race” after the Civil War,Footnote 41 Gilman freely uses race science to find a new place of power for white postmaternal women. But while Gilman is taking part in the long and dispiriting history of using race to argue for white women’s rights to full enfranchisement/adulthood,Footnote 42 in exploiting this argument specifically for middle-aged women she takes over a new space and makes “positive aging” the purview of white women only. Only white women can surpass the constrictions of both physical decline and gender to become the true representatives of the dominant race.
Much of the literature on aging – both critical and literary – focusses on the “shock” of the aging self as a terrifying moment of self-othering as well as a loss of power and vitality, when women are robbed of a positive sense of “cumulative selfhood” and a narrative that might still involve “the prospect of becoming.”Footnote 43 Gilman, however, is arguing quite the opposite. Middle age, for white women, is both a triumphant time of cumulative selfhood (using the wisdom gained through motherhood) and a positive transition into a rich individualism. This is accomplished through elevating whiteness above decline narratives and gender norms as the symbol of both purity and power. By doing this, Gilman also reframes other negative associations of aging for women, most famously de-sexualization (Sontag) and defeminization (de Beauvoir). Indeed, she embraces them, arguing that her subject “is not so taken up with being a woman now, and can realize at last her individual character as a human creature” because “in this matter of personality there is no age.”Footnote 4 The triumphs of Gilman’s middle-aged women surpass gender and sexuality to arrive at a “humanhood” only attainable for white women.
Like much of the positive aging literature in mainstream culture today, nowhere in Gilman’s characterization of middle-aged women does her subject appear compromised by an aging body. By claiming whiteness as perhaps the most important element, she can surpass not only gender, but the physically aging body as well. This elision of the body has been repeated in the theoretical approaches to aging in aging studies itself, which to some extent explains why race has been overlooked as well. As Sweta Rajan-Ranin argues, the erasure of the aging body is “caused perhaps by the fear that focussing on the physical body could be a retrogressive turn which could undermine other social and political gains in understanding aging.”Footnote 45 Indeed, the aging body gets in the way of the type of “progress narratives” that shape creative, scientific, social, economic, and political narratives. Thus, beyond the overt eugenics in Gilman’s argument, the liberation that she promises middle-aged white women, as we have seen, does nothing to interrupt the abjection or “othering” of older bodies that Simone de Beauvoir warned created brutal and unfeeling societies. It also does little to intervene in the notion that productivity is the price of admission into society. Gilman’s middle-aged woman reinforces the idea that the value of a life is tied to its racial identity and its economic worth.Footnote 46
By the 1920s, however, discourses about (assumed white) middle-aged women turn increasingly negative and disciplinary. As Margaret Gullette and historian Patricia Cohen argue, the more “liberatory” narratives of the first ten to fifteen years of the twentieth century are a glimpse of what could have been a very different construction of female aging.Footnote 47 But as we move into the 1920s, the postmaternal woman – in part because she was imagined as both white and privileged – became a crucial foil to the burgeoning youth culture of the post-World War I period and the key consumer target for advice columns and beauty products that policed white middle-aged women’s clothing and behavior in ways and in terms that sound strikingly familiar to contemporary discourses.Footnote 48 In fact, literary scholar Melanie Dawson argues that by the 1920s we begin to see a heightening of “corporeal standardization” and a “norming of ability” that turned discussions of middle age into a “behavioral as much as a chronological category.”Footnote 49 Using a variety of modernist literature and advertising from the 1920s and 1930s, Dawson argues that middle age in this period became a “category … indistinguishable from an insult” and finds a growing consensus that the “aging [subject] should begin to live a life of qualified pleasures and, more encompassingly, that they should adopt vehement self-discipline in response to their changing forms.”Footnote 50 While Dawson’s argument is persuasive, it is important to note the operations of race here. This was a discourse pointed at white women. As we shall see, Black middle-aged women did not become the antithesis of the always young (in white cultural contexts) New Woman of the 1920s.
The turn to negative constructions of white middle-aged women comes about in part due to forces well beyond what the “midlife activists” of the Progressive Era could control and includes the sweeping cultural shifts in the wake of World War I and the fully unleashed power of consumerism. But the positive vision of the middle-aged woman, as I have suggested, was also always a narrow and highly problematic one. As Gilman’s articles show, for a middle-aged woman to have any merit, she must be middle-class, a mother of grown children, productive, youthful, and white.
McDougald’s double task: writing age and the roles of black women at midlife
As discussed above, parsing and claiming different life stages for Black women was a way to push back against both gendered and racialized ideas about Black subjecthood. The recent work of Crystal Lynn Webster and Nazera Sadiq Wright has illuminated how Black communities worked both to protect and to define Black childhood and girlhood in ways that interrupted the assumed connection between whiteness and childhood. In addition, using the work of Black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Frederick Knight’s Black Elders foregrounds Black men and women in old age, showing how they helped hold together Black communities through a commitment to multigenerational cooperation and memory. Less has been said about middle age as a distinct life stage, especially for Black women. I argue here that in ways similar to Black activists before her, the work of Harlem Renaissance writer and educator Gertrude McDougald Ayer uses age to create a visible place for her subjects that challenges the racialization of age generally, and the type of middle age put forward in Gilman’s work, which would become dominant for white women.Footnote 51 Following in the footsteps of women like Maria Stewart, McDougald’s essays of the 1920s carve out a space for Black women’s mature adulthood by conjuring not only their responsibility to help the younger generation of women succeed, but also their own place as public and authoritative older figures who had a role to play as writers, speakers, and thinkers about Black life. McDougald’s women, like McDougald herself, are workers in the modern economy and their problems are discussed not as token figureheads or a set of behaviors that might compromise racial uplift, but rather as multifaceted subjects that deserve multifaceted analysis. Age becomes one of McDougald’s primary tools to make visible the complex subjectivities of the women she writes about, providing important insights into how life stages are signaled in writing by and about Black women.
A teacher, vocational guidance counselor, and social researcher, and the first Black woman principal of a New York City public school, McDougald had a successful career that reached its apex (as was expected in the life course of white middle-class men) in her middle and later years.Footnote 52 Her essays make use of the growing acceptance of women working outside the home in a larger variety of occupations and, connectedly, the loosening grip of domesticity as a requirement for womanhood, both of which had significant implications for Black women. Once Black women’s work became more varied – less oriented to domestic spaces and more connected to professionalized/industrial spaces – discourses on mature adulthood and the achievements of working women might also be lauded for their value to the nation and to the Black race. While McDougald is still forced to discuss the issue of Black female morality in her most famous work “The Task of Negro Womanhood” (1925), by the mid-1920s discourses on gender and race were beginning to move away from “older class-bound tenets of respectability – namely, domesticity, sexual purity, and frugality,”Footnote 53 tenets that often informed Gilman’s argument for the high status of the white middle-aged woman and were impossible metrics for the majority of Black women at the time. In addition, we see the waning of nineteenth-century race science, which reached its peak at the turn of the century.Footnote 54 As Laila Haidarali argues in Brown Beauty, the 1920s saw serious challenges to racist sciences on the level of both proof and “larger changes, including the enhanced participation of ethnic scholars and the development of new disciplines to investigate race.”Footnote 55 McDougald’s work and writing, in both approach and content, were an important and overlooked part of these new investigations.Footnote 56
A version of Elise McDougald’s most famous essay was first published in a special edition of the sociological periodical Survey Graphic, guest-edited by Alain Locke, called Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro (March 1925).Footnote 57 The essay was entitled “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation.” It was then republished later the same year, under a meaningfully revised title, in Locke’s The New Negro, as “The Task of Negro Womanhood.” Both use data collected by McDougald during her work for the Consumers League of the City of New York on African American women’s industrial labor during World War I.Footnote 58 Like The New Negro, the Harlem edition of Survey Graphic was a collection of Black voices in discussion about the rise of young Black creative projects and the working and living conditions of the people who called Harlem home.
While her data-driven approach is a far cry from Gillman’s romanticized version of independent postmaternal womanhood, McDougald, who was in her early forties when her essay was published,Footnote 59 begins her piece by making an argument that would have resonated with white women writers before her: women’s lives are intimately tied to the progress of their race. While McDougald does not use racial hierarchies, she does call Black women the “the weather-vane” of their race. Thus she frames the lives of Black women, “whose problems are of such import to her race,” as a subject worth paying attention to in a moment when Black subjecthood was being recast.Footnote 60 While this is clearly not a new idea, in answering this question, McDougald signals life stages to differentiate distinctive needs and accomplishments of Black women. She does not define middle age specifically, but age is everywhere in her answer to how we understand Black women’s lives. As we will see, in consistently delineating “girls,” “young women,” and “mothers” from “women,” McDougald stakes out an important space for middle-aged women and ties their value to the progress both of younger women and of the race.Footnote 61 In addition, by signaling different life stages for Black women without resorting to the young/old binary (and thus hierarchal) thinking so important to white constructions of age narratives like Gilman’s, McDougald ensures Black postmaternal women’s place as members of New Negro Womanhood.Footnote 62
The fact that McDougald could not speak on behalf of middle-aged women more overtly, however, is important to think about. As recent scholars of aging studies have noted, both older bodies and bodies of color are “denigrated through the hegemonic (white, youth-centered, and masculinist) gaze.”Footnote 63 In order, then, for McDougald to make older Black women visible, she must “see beyond” the not only dominant discourses of gender and race, but age as well.Footnote 64 Thus, while McDougald’s essay is clearly a counternarrative to hegemonic discourses of race and gender – and has been read as such – it is also, more implicitly, an argument for the importance of seeing Black women in different life stages, including older Black women. Her delineation of different life stages combats the “agelessness” of Black bodies that informs larger racist projects of dehumanization. As scholar Habiba Ibrahim eloquently argues, “Within the purview of slavery’s historicity, the denial of liberal humanist normativity makes blackness appear untimely … it appears to have the object status of an ancient artifact, or it signifies something ‘inherently childlike’ irrespective of chronological age.”Footnote 65 Ibrahim highlights the writings of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, noting that they “posit age as a conceptual challenge borne out of the racialization of the human,” and argues that “personhood begins with the temporality of human development.”Footnote 66 McDougald’s writing signals this temporality, using it to challenge the dehumanization of Black women generally and, more specifically, the narratives of middle age like Gilman’s that, in part, defined this stage of life through the marginalization of women who were not white.Footnote 67
After establishing that the progress of Black women is connected to the progress of the race, McDougald calls attention to – and interrupts white stereotypical ideas about – Black bodies by offering a different image of Black women in a process that postcolonial scholars call the “reanimation” of racialized bodies that have been exiled from the “category of human.”Footnote 68 McDougald does this by asking her readers to see Black women as “a colorful pageant of individuals, each differently endowed,” like “the red and yellow of the tiger-lily,” varying “in infinite degree, with traces of the race’s history left in physical and mental outline on each.”Footnote 69 If one has a “discerning mind,” she argues, “one catches the multiform charm, beauty and character of Negro women, and grasps the fact that their problems cannot be thought of in mass.”Footnote 70 To do this, McDougald is careful to delineate the different socioeconomic positions of Black women living in Harlem. Importantly, however, this is not the only way she creates a “multiform” picture. McDougald also differentiates between “Negro mothers … trying the rear their children,” “Negro girls [who] are training” for clerical and secretarial jobs, “young college women” dedicated to racial uplift, and finally the “Negro woman … [with] scores of years of service” in the modern (nondomestic) economy in fields such as nursing and, especially, education.Footnote 71 By insisting on what Crystal Lynn Webster calls “discrete separations,” age becomes an important part of McDougald’s antiracist project.Footnote 72
However, unlike Gilman, who erases the aging body to give white women over fifty a role in society, McDougald highlights the difficult fight Black women wage every day to see themselves as embodied subjects outside the white gaze. This is no easy task, McDougald writes: “She realizes that the ideals of beauty … have excluded her almost entirely … Instead, the grotesque Aunt Jemimas of the streetcar advertisements, proclaim only an ability to serve, without grace of loveliness.”Footnote 73 This image, McDougald notes, which is most “often used to provoke the mirthless laugh of ridicule,” casts a “shadow” over Black women, and with it “comes the twilight of self-doubt and a sense of personal inferiority.”Footnote 74 McDougald’s choice to focus on Aunt Jemima has a particular resonance here. In the 1920s, images of Aunt Jemima read as both middle-aged and anachronistic.Footnote 75 In addition, as historian Kimberly Wallace-Sanders argues, by the 1920s Aunt Jemima had been installed as “mammy within the national household” and was a “key element of an early twentieth-century idealized domesticity projected and promoted as inspired by old southern hospitability.”Footnote 76 Within this “idealized domesticity,” Aunt Jemima’s role was to serve white children and families as an eternally maternal figure, neither too young nor too old – thus denying Black women the postmaternal stage outside the domestic arena with its promises of progress and independent self-worth.
In addition, McDougald’s discussion of Aunt Jemima insists on the importance of resisting racist cultural constructions of the body (which can be useful when encountering ageist constructions of the body). It also insists on replacing that construction with something else. McDougald builds a new embodied subjecthood when she creates original linguistic representations of Black women, like the “the red and yellow of the tiger-lily.”Footnote 77 Thus McDougald’s “reanimation” critiques the way Black women are made known in the normative terms set out by the dominant culture, but also creates a subject of value in her difference from that dominant, racialized culture. This has important implications for the discourse of aging, which must continually manage processes of othering based on physical difference.
As part of her reanimation work, McDougald sat for photographs and had her portrait painted. Her image, with her strands of visibly gray hair, was popular in 1920s Harlem. In addition to the portrait that appears in both Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, and The New Negro,Footnote 78 a photograph of her in a classic flapper gown was used for the January 1924 cover of The Messenger. Later images of her (as Gertrude Elise Ayer once she remarried) abound in newspaper articles about her work in education, especially after becoming the first Black woman to be named principal of a New York City public school in 1935.Footnote 79 Much like Frederick Douglass’s committed use of photography in the nineteenth century, which defined Black manhood in distinguished and notably different life stages, McDougald used her image to “offset” and “oppose” the racist, domesticized images of Black women proliferating with the growth of advertising in this period.Footnote 80 And, as Hairarali points out in Brown Beauty, McDougald’s image is associated with grace, education, and the fight for better employment opportunities rather than with chastity, virtue, and, I would add, an accommodating domesticity for white families embodied by Aunt Jemima.Footnote 81 Important in this context is that McDougald’s image also reinforces the inclusion of middle-aged, postmaternal women like herself in the shift to a new set of values through an image consciousness associated with modernity rather than the “romanticized mythology of the plantation” associated with Aunt Jemima.Footnote 82
The example of Aunt Jemima is also an important precursor to McDougald’s discussion of Black motherhood, which she turns to next in her essay. McDougald wants her readers to “pay tribute to these Negro mothers. And to call attention to the service she is rendering to the nation, in her struggle against great odds to educate and care for one group of the country’s children,” while also working outside the home.Footnote 83 As her use of the word “one” when referring to a group of children makes clear, McDougald is pointedly not talking about white children. Unlike the stereotypical Mammy, who was portrayed as devoted to her white charges and “impatient or brusque” with her own,Footnote 84 the mother McDougald praises is the “modern Negro mother,” which she calls “a more inspiring subject.” She further delineates this group as “self-directed” and at the same time as “loyal and tender” to her own children as the “much extolled, yet pitiable black mammy of slavery days.”Footnote 85
However, McDougald’s praise of underappreciated Black mothers is not only an antiracist move. In designating them as a specific group, McDougald continues to build their subjectivity through defining the different struggles of Black women according to the different stages of their lives. But unlike their white counterparts – imagined by the nineteenth-century women’s activists discussed by Field, or later by women like Gilman – these mothers have always worked and thus “face the great problem of leaving home each day and at the same time trying to raise their children in their spare time.”Footnote 86 McDougald accomplishes two things here: she elevates Black working mothers to a high, even patriotic, status, rendering a “service to the nation” – countering the current dominant narrative that Black women lacked maternal tendencies toward their own childrenFootnote 87 – and she groups them in their own specific place of struggle that is connected to age: their offspring are still “children” who need to be “raised” under her care. Thus they have the unique life-stage problems of balancing the demands of child rearing with long hours of work to support their families. In rendering this as a life-stage problem, McDougald signals that there are others.
Similar to her discussion of Black mothers, McDougald speaks separately about the specific problems of prejudice faced by “Negro girls” who are nonetheless “training and some are holding exceptional jobs,”Footnote 88 and “young college women, anxious to devote their education and lives toward helping the submerged classes.”Footnote 89 These girls and young women thus also have their age-specific (and class-specific) challenges: girls are starting out and looking for meaningful training and employment in pointedly nondomestic settings, while older college-aged women are feeling the pressure to use their education to help others. Their problems are distinct and tied to their temporal identities as much as to their class, gender, and race. Here again, McDougald uses age as a tool for delineated differences that are foundational to subjecthood.
But “mothers,” “girls,” and “young college women” are also different from the women not classified under any of these monikers. Their stories, sprinkled throughout the essay, are of women who have already labored for decades and, through their hard work and perseverance (i.e., through their own progressive journeys through time), reached positions that open new avenues of employment for younger Black women. These examples carve out a significant space for older women in relation to both racial progress and a personal empowerment that comes with experience and age.
While McDougald does not give the specific ages of these women, she references time through their years of work and progress within their fields. For examples, McDougald talks of “one Negro woman, beginning as a uniformed maid in the shoe department of one of the largest stores, [who] has pulled herself up to the position of ‘head of stock,’” and later tells the story of one “of the most prosperous monthly magazines of national circulation,” which “has for the head of its news service a Negro woman who rose from the position of stenographer.”Footnote 90 “Her duties,” McDougald notes with approval, “involve attendance upon staff conferences, executive supervision of her staff of white office workers, broadcasting and journalism of the highest order.”Footnote 91 In another example she tells the story of a woman who “thirty years ago” began learning about the fur trade. McDougald reports, “She is now in business for herself, employing three women of her race” and “has made fur experts of still another half-dozen colored girls.”Footnote 92 Finally, in another example of middle-aged women helping young women become more independent, she tells the story of a nurse who after “a score of years of service … became superintendent of nurses in the war emergency. Deposed after the armistice, though eminently satisfactory, she retained connection with the training school as lecturer, for the inspiration she could be to ‘her girls.’”Footnote 93 Like Maria Stewart, McDougald makes clear that middle-aged Black women have a distinct role to play. Unlike the harried mothers, the girls starting out, or the college-educated young women figuring out their role in racial uplift, middle-aged Black women in “The Task of Negro Womanhood” are beacons of success with an abiding concern for the younger generation, using their years of experience to help “her girls.” Noticeably, these middle-aged working women are not valued solely or even primarily for their ability to become or remain productive independent members of a capitalist society in the ways articulated in Gilman’s piece in Success. Rather, they are also important figures in the fight for both racial and gender equality.
The women whose years of hard work McDougald is at pains to make visible are also reflective of the author’s own experience. “The Task of Negro Womanhood” and “The Double Task: The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race Emancipation” use data collected by McDougald herself, including from her years of experience as the head of P.S. 119’s vocational guidance bureau, where she worked from 1919 to 1924.Footnote 94 Like the other women in the essay, McDougald’s status as middle-aged woman who worked for the good of her race with special emphasis on labor and workplace opportunity builds a positive and visible role for middle-aged Black women and lays claim to their inclusion, not only as the club women of an earlier generation, though she does mention them, but also as paid workers of the modern economy firmly outside the realm of the domestic.
Indeed, McDougald uses her own knowledge of working in public education as a central example in both essays. She begins by discussing the special place Black women have managed to make for themselves in the New York City public-school system, noting that one woman is an assistant principal at an elementary school, where the others in her role are white. “Still another Negro woman,” McDougald writes, “is a vocational counsellor under the Board of Education, in a junior high school … This position, the result of pioneer work by another Negro woman, is unique in the school system of New York.”Footnote 95 McDougald and women like her are distinguished not only for their role in shaping young Black minds, but also for the trails they have blazed for younger Black women, specifically in jobs like education that can be connected to racial futurity. The focus on education also marks its distinction from Gilman’s essay. The intergenerational space that so defines schooling fits in well with McDougald’s vision of middle-aged women doing important race work and at the same time arriving at positions of power after years in the labor force.
But given the ongoing tension between oppressions, and the ways in which racism worked to infantilize Black men through gendered language as well as the masculinist bent of the Harlem Renaissance itself, McDougald engages cautiously with issues more pointedly related to “sex equality.” We see this not only in her carefully curated image of middle-aged femininity, and the title change of her essay for The New Negro, which de-emphasizes gender equality,Footnote 96 but also in the way McDougald summarizes the importance of education – which she discusses both in “The Task of Negro Womanhood” and in an earlier article she wrote for The Messenger, “The Negro Woman Teacher and the Negro Student” (1923)Footnote 97 – as a relationship between a Black woman teacher and an assumed male student.Footnote 98 Beginning with the remark that “[l]aws are no longer made forbidding teaching to the black man,”Footnote 99 McDougald argues in The Messenger,
It is the high duty of the Negro woman teacher to teach the Negro youth to maintain a critical attitude toward what he learns, rather than to lay emphasis on stuffing, and inflating him only with the thoughts of others … The Negro youth must learn to think vigorously, to hold his spiritual and mental balance.Footnote 100
While we cannot make too much of the male pronoun given the historical period, the language of the quote is highly gendered: the “critical attitude” and the vigor to think independent thoughts were ideal masculine characteristics of the time. Meanwhile, again and again in her essays from this period, women, especially middle-aged women, are still connected to “duty” and the work of uplift through a more conservative idea of service and training for the younger and/or poorer populations – thus the “task” in the title of her most famous work. In an unsigned editorial that prefaces McDougald’s education article as well as others on Black women and work in The Messenger, their role is made even clearer:
Upon her shoulders rests the big task to create and keep alive, in the breast of black men, a holy and consuming passion to break with the slave traditions of the past; to spurn and overcome the fatal, insidious inferiority complex of the present, which … arrest the progress of the New Negro Manhood Movement; and to fight with … unrelenting zeal … for the attainment of the stature of a full man.Footnote 101
No one is more central to this task than Black women teachers, who, despite McDougald’s focus on nondomestic work, do take on a kind of professionalized elder maternalism to give birth to New Negro Manhood. Indeed, in a quote from a Black radio show on WWRL entitled “Unsung Heroes” in 1963, the host notes, “Though proud of all the students she met as a teacher, Mrs. [McDougald] Ayer seemed happiest about ‘My Native Sons’ as she referred to Judge Kenneth Phipps, author James Baldwin, and newspaper man George Barner.”Footnote 102
Nonetheless, McDougald pushes for progressive education, paying attention to internal and personal growth and showcasing outward, race-conscious accomplishments, while at the same time managing the gendered requirements of women teachers.Footnote 103 In this context, she embraced the idea that young Black men, educated by older Black women teachers, could bring forth greater “sex equality.” For example, she notes in “The Task of Negro Womanhood” that the growing economic independence of Black “working women is causing her to rebel against the [traditional] domineering family attitude.”Footnote 104 But, while younger “[w]orking mothers are unable to instill different ideals in the sons,” Black women teachers are “modifying the spirit of younger Negro men” in the direction of gender equality.Footnote 105 However, McDougald warns, the “challenge to young Negro womanhood is to see clearly this trend and grasp the proffered comradeship with sincerity.”Footnote 106 Older Black women like herself teach the younger generation of men to embrace the “sex equality” younger women are looking for, and then task those younger women with embracing and endorsing such feelings in young men. Notably, however, it is up to younger women to see this “trend” and foster it. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, McDougald ends this paragraph by subsuming the struggle for sex equality under that of racial equality, summarizing, “On the whole the Negro woman’s feminist efforts are directed chiefly toward the realization of the equality of the races, the sex struggle assuming the subordinate place.”Footnote 107 Charting the different, age-specific roles women play in pursuit of both gendered and racial equality and expanded opportunities in the modern era, McDougald’s arguments illustrate the ways both race and racism construct different imperatives of gender and age.
Finally, McDougald’s essay shows that the work of middle-aged black women is crucial to the image and success of black womanhood more generally, though not, as was the case in earlier historical contexts, as the moral standard-bearer and enforcer, but rather as empathetic and knowledgeable defenders of the race. For example, toward the end of “The Task of Negro Womanhood,” McDougald conjures the white racist image of Black women (especially working-class Black women) as sexually promiscuous, and makes a strong counterargument:
The Negro woman does not maintain any moral standard which may be assigned chiefly to qualities of race, any more than a white woman does … Superficial critics who have had contact only with the lower grades of Negro women, claim that they are more immoral than other groups of women. This I deny. This is the sort of criticism which predicates of one race, to its detriment, that which is common to all races. Sex irregularities are not a matter of race, but socio-economic conditions.Footnote 108
While part of McDougald’s defense of working-class Black women in particular, this bold and beautifully succinct passage strongly argues against gendered and racist assumptions that were historically hard for Black middle-class women to discuss in public.Footnote 109 In connection, McDougald notes that while Black families were no more at ease with out-of-wedlock sex than white families, the children of such unions were often taken care of by the older “married aunt” or “the girl’s mother” who “claims the illegitimate child as her own.” In fact, McDougald argues that the older Black woman,
schooled in this kind of suffering in the days of slavery … often tempers scorn with sympathy … Stigma does fall upon the unmarried mother, but perhaps in this matter the Negro’s attitude is nearer the modern enlightened ideal for the social treatment of the unfortunate. May not this, too, be considered another contribution to America?Footnote 110
Here McDougald echoes arguments made in the 1860s and 1870s by Black activist Francis E. W. Harper, who reasoned (in both her fiction and political writings) that white dependence on arguments of racial superiority disqualifies them from moral leadership.Footnote 111 At the same time, McDougald is making the argument that older Black women are more modern in their outlook than white women, making their empathetic response to younger women a tailwind to the progress of the nation as it embraces a new era. These passages, then, not only challenge racist and ageist assumptions, but also justify otherness itself by centering and valorizing the empathetic perspective of older Black women.Footnote 112
Clearly the role that middle-aged women play in Black life is not conceived in the same terms that become prevalent for white women at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it is also clear that middle-aged women and questions of race were prominent for both white and Black women, though in highly different ways. Some white middle-aged women claimed their right to a place at the table as seasoned representatives of a superior race, while, as McDougald shows, older Black women were leaders in the fight for racial equality and teaching the younger generation to see themselves both as individuals and as adults with positive race and gender consciousness. Because the majority of Black women were forced to work through most of life’s stages, the idea of a separate “postmaternal” womanhood perhaps carried less weight. But in their persistence through their middle years, they were able to gain a real measure of independence that McDougald signaled as a distinct life stage, while building pathways for the younger generations of Black girls and young women. Indeed, it is because of McDougald’s signaling of different life stages that we see Black girlhood and young womanhood more clearly.
Gilman takes pains to discuss the ways women who had spent (and were privileged to spend) their early years devoting their time and attention to their spouses and children could turn their knowledge of domestic work into businesses that would supply them with an important measure of economic independence. Thus middle-class and middle-aged white women could perhaps find a more notable separate stage of life once their domestic duties ended. This discontinuity allowed them to reassess their lives in new ways that might be tempting to celebrate were they not so rooted in the need to retain both youthfulness and racial hierarchies. Black women writers also carved out a meaningful place for middle-aged women, often through tying their work to the rise of the younger generation and racial progress, but also by calling attention to their own accomplishments. This intergenerational connection is much less emphasized in the more individualistic progress narratives of middle-aged white women.Footnote 113 Race, however, was clearly important to both aging trajectories, with white women claiming their racial power for themselves once they aged out of motherhood, while Black women claimed power as modern workers and professionals who could, among other things, lead the younger generation of their race to new opportunities.
Despite the negative associations of aging, especially for women, claiming middle age as a stage of life is very much a privilege. It carries with it notions of maturity and power that should be open to anyone as they age. McDougald’s ability to shape a separate but connected space for older Black women, despite pressures to prioritize youthfulness and manliness, is important to recognize not only for the way it intervenes in racist constructs of Black agelessness, but also for its illumination of a different discourse on aging. What I hope this article makes clear is that Black women’s narratives use life stages to lay claim to temporal subjectivities that are foundational to personhood and participate in the creation of disparate and unique middle-aged identities that must be included in work that seeks to understand women and aging.
Athena Devlin is an Associate Professor of English and American Studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, NY. Thanks to my anonymous readers at the Journal of American Studies, Dr. Sara Rzeszutek, and Anthony Lacavaro.
