Tomorrow's Tomorrow

by Ladner, Joyce A.

• ISBN13: 9780803279568
• ISBN10: 0803279566
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-08-01
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr

Summary

Tomorrow's Tomorrowis 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."

Author Biography

Joyce A. Ladner is acting president of Howard University.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Paperback Edition	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xvii
Introduction	p. xix
Yesterday: Black Womanhood in Historical Perspective	p. 1
Growing Up Black	p. 44
Racial Oppression and the Black Girl	p. 67
The Definition of Womanhood	p. 102
Images of Black Womanhood	p. 120
Becoming a Woman: Part I	p. 177
Becoming a Woman: Part II	p. 240
Conclusions	p. 270
Bibliography	p. 289
Index	p. 299
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