Work-in-Progress
Collective Enterprise and Individual Achievement: Maggie Lena Walker and Africanamerican Business Culture
| This project explores the ways in which Maggie Lena Walker publicly imagined and represented herself as banker and businesswoman in the early twentieth century. Drawing on a series of official images, I explore issues of representation and self-representation in Walker 's work in order to gain insight into what it meant to be a banker and insurance executive connected to a fraternal order and what it meant to be a black woman banker and insurance executive in the age of the Race Woman. These images suggest where Walker saw her strengths and what she saw as the tropes she could draw on to bolster her position and elicit public confidence in her and thus in her bank and businesses. They also suggest the ways in which she struggled to position herself and to be seen. In the process they raise questions about what exactly it meant to be a black female banker and businesswoman and, most especially, what exactly it meant to be a banker and businesswoman with a commitment to fraternalism and mutual benefit. | |
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Initial discussion presented at "Meanings and Representations of Work in the Lives of Women of Color" Research Seminar, Bellagio Conference and Study Center, Bellagio, Italy, August 2004.
Direct questions or comments to Elsa Barkley Brown