Tomorrow's Tomorrow: The Black Woman

by Joyce A. Ladner

Tomorrow’s Tomorrow is a pioneering sociological study of black girls growing up in the city. The author, in a substantial new introduction, considers what has changed and what has remained constant for them since the book was first published in 1971.

 

Joyce A. Ladner spent four years interviewing, observing, and socializing with more than a hundred girls living in the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. She was challenged by preconceived academic ideas and labels and by her own past as a black child in rural Mississippi. Rejecting the white middle-class perspective of “deviant” behavior, she examined the expectations and aspirations of these representative black girls and their feelings about parents and boyfriends, marriage, pregnancy, and child-rearing.

 

Ladner asked what life was like in the urban black community for the “average” girl, how she defined her roles and behaviors, and where she found her role models. She was interested in any significant disparity between aspirations and the resources to achieve them. To what extent did the black teenager share the world of her white peers? If the questions were searching, the conclusions were provocative. According to Ladner, “The total misrepresentation of the Black community and the various myths which surround it can be seen in microcosm in the Black female adolescent.”

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Ethnography

306 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1972

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an extremely well-written ethnography that is a must-read for anyone interested in race, gender, and social science. Ladner systematically dispels the myths surrounding and pathologization of Black women in poverty. She powerfully concludes by directly questioning whether the hegemonic values of the White middle class are values to which anyone (especially Black women) should aspire.

[Arnie Hill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Found this book through a reference in Patricia Hill Collin's 'Black Feminist Thought' (1991). This is a perhaps at as groundbreaking as Hill's book, and even better in the sense of concrete organic intellectual experiences and theorisations which run throughout the entire book.

[Mary Braden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This study of poor black girls growing up in the late 60s in a St. Louis housing project is powerful reading. The author, a black female sociologist, approaches her subjects with the principle that their so-called "deviant" behaviors are actually strengths developed in response to the oppressive culture of institutional racism. The concluding chapter is a powerful indictment of middle-class white culture and a forthright celebration of the black culture which has somehow thrived and blossomed in spite of it. The writing can be hard to follow in places, but that may be more from my unfamiliarity with sociology than from any weakness in the author.