Overview

Inequalities of Love uses the personal narratives of college-educated black women to describe the difficulties they face when trying to date, marry, and have children. While conventional wisdom suggests that all women, regardless of race, must sacrifice romance and family for advanced educations and professional careers, Averil Y. Clarke's research reveals that educated black women's disadvantages in romance and starting a family are consequences of a system of racial inequality and discrimination. The author analyzes the accounts of black women who repeatedly return to incompatible partners as they lose hope of finding ""Mr. Right"" and reject unwed parenting because it seems to affirm a negative stereotype of black women's sexuality that is inconsistent with their personal and professional identities. She uses national survey data to compare college-educated black women's experiences of romance, reproduction, and family to those of less-educated black women and those of white and Hispanic women with degrees. She reports that degreed black women's lives include less marriage and sex, and more unwanted pregnancy, abortion, and unwed childbearing than college-educated white and Hispanic women. Black women's romantic limitations matter because they constitute deprivation and constraint in romance and because they illuminate important links between race, class, and gender inequality in the United States. Clarke's discussion of the inequities that black women experience in romance highlights the connections between individuals' sexual and reproductive decisions, their performance of professional or elite class identities, and the avoidance of racial stigma.

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9780822350088

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Reviews

I found Inequalities of Love fascinating and innovative. Many authors throw around rhetoric about the 'intersections' of gender, race, and class, but Averil Y. Clarke has really given us intersectionality analysis. Her unique combination of qualitative interviews and skilled analysis of demographic data produces a new understanding of how race and class create unequal access to 'love,' serious relationships and marriage. Paula England, co-editor of Unmarried Couples with Children Inequalities of Love is an important and innovative book. It combines rigorous qualitative and quantitative methods in order to give both a macro-demographic portrait and an intimate individual-level account of family-formation decisions, choices, contexts, and constraints. It moves away from the simplistic causal arguments about the relationship between childbearing and socioeconomic outcomes by refocusing our attention on systems of meaning and evaluation, and by expanding the conversation beyond pure economic attainment to include status attainment. Inequalities of Love is an eminently smart book that will appeal to sociologists, demographers, human development scholars, and policy researchers. Mary Pattillo, author of Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City

Author Information

Averil Y. Clarke is a sociologist living in New Haven, Connecticut.

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