Nearly 100 years after Hiram Revels became the first Black man elected to the U.S. Senate and 30 years after Crystal Dreda Bird Fauset became the first Black woman elected to a state legislature, Shirley Chisholm was elected to Congress. Chisholm was a Black woman, daughter of immigrants, and social worker elected to represent economically depressed communities largely overlooked by mainstream society. Her remarks on her entry into the hallowed halls of Congress were a direct indictment of our collective tendency to devalue differences within groups: “I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin. When you put it that way it sounds like a foolish reason for fame. In a just and free society it would be foolish. That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, black, and a woman proves, I think, that our society is not yet either just or free.”
Since that time, a small but growing cadre of Black women has served in legislatures across the United States prompting scholarly interest in how their experiences vary. Rather than situating these experiences as ancillary, intersectionality scholarship sees them as integral to understanding the strength, function, and salience of political identities. Nadia E. Brown's book, Sisters in the Statehouse, is born of a persistent demand to center the varied experiences of Black women as political actors. Brown's focus on the Maryland State legislature as a case study builds upon intersectionality research's core belief that identity is necessarily fluid, layered, and complex. Maryland, with its larger number of Black women officeholders, diverse class profile, professional legislature, and varied policy space provides a case that is both theoretically and substantively useful. Brown deftly employs a variety of research tools to reject the disciplinary tendency to capture identity as a dichotomous variable that treats personal narratives as isolated biographies. Rather, she integrates these experiences to more aptly capture the complexities of political identity along the markers of race, gender, generational standing, class, education, geography, religiosity, and institutional norms. In so doing, she affirms the need to analyze how political context shapes the impact of intersecting, and at times conflicting, identities on political behavior.
Nadia Brown offers a theory she calls representational identity theory, to highlight intra and intergroup differences amongst Black women legislators. The theory departs from traditional studies that treat race and gender as discrete categories. Instead, representational identity theory provides guidance for understanding how legislators negotiate and order their preferences based on the issues and interests at hand. Her in-depth interviews with Black women serving in the Maryland state legislature coupled with the extensive feminist life histories she crafts, helps paint a more nuanced picture of how these women prioritize their political choices when faced with multiple and at times competing demands. The theory is a sound rejection of the prevailing expectation that holding party identification constant, all or most Black women will prioritize their political behavior along the same continuum. It is this emphasis on situational demands that marks Sisters in the Statehouse as a pathbreaking text for students and scholars across a variety of disciplines.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 explore Black women's legislative behavior across three policy domains that ostensibly activate different identity-based calculations. That Black women assert their position to advocate in support of Minority Business Enterprise contracts for Black women is not very surprising. However, Brown uses this finding to better understand how Black women reconcile limits on their physical political presence (e.g. seniority and incumbency) with their internal call to bolster substantive representation. The nuances and complexities of this calculation are best reflected in Brown's analysis of support for bills concerning domestic violence petitions, and others to guard against financial exploitation of the elderly. By moving beyond party and ideology to explain differences in Black women's political choices, Brown introduces generational cohort as a key contextual determinant. For example, she argues that the varying levels of support for legislation protecting marriage equality reveals that younger legislators are more progressive and inclusive than their more seasoned colleagues. This finding lends itself to the critique that the author should better specify the causal mechanisms at play. Is it that younger legislators view marriage equality as central to the overall protection of civil rights and social justice? Or do older legislators view marriage equality different when calculating which policy issues demand immediate legislative attention? Given the institutional constraints legislators face (e.g. the need to build legislative coalitions; party platforms; committee leadership; etc.), how do concepts such as proximity and urgency shape identity negotiations?
This is a but a minor critique of the book but one that speaks to the larger challenges of building viable legislative coalitions that recognize and respond to Black women's diverse political interests. Sisters in the Statehouse is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and insightful. Nadia Brown provides a useful blueprint for future studies of Black women as political actors in a variety of spaces. As the political profile of Black women continues to diversify and policy problems intensify, it is even more imperative that scholars account for the impact of understudied intersecting identities such as immigration status, sexual identity, religious affiliation, and partisanship.
