The ‘Organized Anxiety’ of Labour Leader Nannie Helen Burroughs

Abstract

Educator and labour leader Nannie Helen Burroughs and her colleagues at the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACW) experienced ‘organized anxiety’ during the early twentieth century as they worked to establish a comprehensive labour reform movement in the United States. Burroughs’ colleague and NACW leader Fannie Barrier Williams coined the term ‘organized anxiety’ to describe Black women’s politicized emotions that fuelled their expansive organization as they worked to build a truly democratic society. NACW members, such as Burroughs, integrated their fight for labour rights into their larger movement for women’s suffrage and civil rights. Burroughs established a school and women’s organizations to challenge ideologies and institutions that confined Black women to low-wage service work and denied them full citizenship rights. In this article, I draw from Hochschild’s emotional labour theory, which brings women’s ‘invisible’ work into view, and Williams’ organized anxiety concept to examine Burroughs’ unrecognized, yet critical work of developing and leading a labour reform movement for Black women in a country that denied their very humanity.

Keywords:

• Nannie Helen Burroughs
• African American women
• organized anxiety
• educators
• domestic service
• labour history
• emotional labour

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Black feminist legal scholar Pauli Murray coined the term ‘Jane Crow’ to describe and critique the racial and gender discrimination that Black women faced in laws and in social movements (Murray 1965).

2 Burroughs was the corresponding secretary of the Woman’s Convention (WC), the auxiliary group of the National Baptist Convention (NBC). The NBC was the largest Black Baptist organization in the United States.

3 The NAWE co-founders and officers included Mary McLeod Bethune as vice-president, Minnie L. Bradley, executive secretary (New Haven, Connecticut); Elizabeth C. Carter, chairman of the investment board (New Bedford, Massachusetts); Lizzie Foust, registrar (Lexington, Kentucky); Maggie L. Walker, treasurer (Richmond, Virginia); Georgine Kelly Smith, chairman advisory council (New York); and Maude A. Morrisey, recording secretary (Pennsylvania) (NAWE 1924c).

4 BIPOC stands for Black, Indigenous, People of Color.

5 It is important to note that Latinx, indigenous, and other women of color such as Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association with Cesar Chavez (https://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/), have also made significant contributions to US labour movements and were marginalized in mainstream white labour organizations.