African American women working in the Twin Cities during the mid-twentieth century: Discovering their vocational identity

Abstract

Existing scholarship has no examination of attributing the discourse on vocational identity to African American women, which in this study, has been defined as what a woman ought to be and do. African American women have been a subject of scholarly inquiry on having the longest history of paid work. This qualitative dissertation contains their narrative excerpts on working in the Twin Cities during the mid-twentieth century (1945-1985) from interviews with seventeen women aged 65 to 87. Analyzed topics were the concept of vocation, the ideology of vocation within the intersections of race, gender, and class related to paid and unpaid work. Hermeneutic philosophy advanced by Gadamer (1960/1975) formed the methodological approach to elicit themes of their perceived vocational identity.