Black Women, Black Love, Dianne M Stewart
Black Women, Black Love, Dianne M Stewart
2 Rating(s)
List: $27.99 | Sale: $19.59
Club: $13.99

Black Women, Black Love
America's War on African American Marriage

Author: Dianne M Stewart

Narrator: Tracey Leigh

Unabridged: 9 hr 20 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Seal Press

Published: 10/06/2020


Synopsis

In this analysis of social history, examine the complex lineage of America's oppression of Black companionship.
According to the 2010 US census, more than seventy percent of Black women in America are unmarried. Black Women, Black Love reveals how four centuries of laws, policies, and customs have created that crisis.
Dianne Stewart begins in the colonial era, when slave owners denied Blacks the right to marry, divided families, and, in many cases, raped enslaved women and girls. Later, during Reconstruction and the ensuing decades, violence split up couples again as millions embarked on the Great Migration north, where the welfare system mandated that women remain single in order to receive government support. And no institution has forbidden Black love as effectively as the prison-industrial complex, which removes Black men en masse from the pool of marriageable partners.
Prodigiously researched and deeply felt, Black Women, Black Love reveals how white supremacy has systematically broken the heart of Black America, and it proposes strategies for dismantling the structural forces that have plagued Black love and marriage for centuries.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Raymond on December 12, 2020

Dianne Stewart’s book makes the argument that systemic racism has kicked many Black men out of the marriage pool which in turn causes Black women to less likely be married compared to White women. Racism's effect makes Black women's marriage choices slim, the system creates less marriageable Black m......more

Goodreads review by Dawn on February 13, 2022

So this is pretty hard for me, as I was really looking forward to getting this book. I usually borrow from the library, but because this book is new and unavailable in my local library (and I really like to purchase books by little known POC) I decided to buy it through audible instead. As an unambi......more

Goodreads review by Nita (ecobookworm) on March 03, 2021

TLDR: I wouldn't recommend this for casual readers, but this is perfect for those who want a deeper dive into the historical and societal barriers to Black heterosexual love and marriage in the USA. *I received an advance reader copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review via NetGall......more

Goodreads review by Maria on January 12, 2021

Really good first half. It put a new perspective to black lives that I had not been aware of. She lost me with the second half of the book. Personal responsibility is a value that she does not seem to endorse as all ills that befall black women's lives are not their responsibility but blamed on gove......more

Goodreads review by Joelle on November 21, 2021

As a white woman who has been married 15 years, it's easy to judge or think I have the answers as to why Black women aren't getting married. This book was a humbling lesson in the reasons they can't, even though most desperately long to. I appreciated the stance she takes in differentiating between......more


Quotes

“Stewart marshals substantial evidence to back up her thesis—proof of a centuries-long assault on Black love and marriage that in her hands takes the form of persuasive case histories of women, past and present.... It offers a fresh and surprising look at the economic, spiritual, structural and emotional constraints on the hundreds of thousands of Black women for whom love and marriage are neither blithely expected nor easy. In that, it feels not so much necessary as needed.”—New York Times

"Powerful, persuasive, and devastatingly haunting. Dianne M. Stewart has placed a historical and structural lens on the most personal, intimate areas of our lives and brought them into clear focus."—Carol Anderson, New York Times-bestselling author of White Rage

"Black Women, Black Love is profoundly necessary and long overdue. Dianne M. Stewart decimates popular myths about Black love and marriage. She reveals through data, history, and compelling storytelling that structural racism and patriarchy -- beginning with slavery and continuing through racist welfare policies, mass incarceration, and more -- have consistently thwarted the efforts of Black women to marry and sustain healthy, loving relationships."—Michelle Alexander, New York Times-bestselling author of The New Jim Crow

"Dianne M. Stewart's compelling Black Women, Black Love is the first Black feminist/womanist analysis of the structural barriers that make marriage for heterosexual African American women elusive, even impossible, within a racist, sexist America. In painstaking detail, she makes the provocative case that our persistent marital dilemmas over four centuries should be seen as a hidden civil rights issue. Her exploration of the concept of 'forbidden Black love' is nuanced, moving, and attentive to a broad range of variables. Personal narratives enhance her solid, though unsettling, arguments about America's persistent war on Black marriage, as well as 'undesired singlehood' for generations of women who love Black men."—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women's Studies, Spelman College, and coauthor of Gender Talk