Ensuring Inequality

Donna Franklin provides the reader with a very important lesson in how to understand current stresses in family life by studying the ways in which early experiences and circumstances led logically and inevitably to the present depressing, even alarming, state of family life at the end of the twentieth century. This is an important work." -John Hope Franklin, author of From Freedom to Slavery: A History of African Americans

Why are so many African-American children growing up in mother-led families? From a nuanced historical perspective, Donna Franklin offers no-holds-barred answers to this question.... She brings a provocative new perspective to America's pressing debates about poverty, fatherlessness, and how to (really) reform welfare." -Theda Skocpol, Professor of Government and Sociology, Harvard University

Ensuring Inequality is a well-crated, closely reasoned, and well-documented narrative that challenges conventional understanding of the plight of African American families." -Martin Rein, Professor of Urban Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Franklin's book is a well-informed, thoughful and insightful synthesis, demolishing a number of destructive fallacies as it proceeds through its highly readable chapters. It should be useful to all concerned with family, African American history, social policy and many others." -Linda Gordon, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin

No meaningful future discussion of the problems of the black family or of the American 'underclass' can occur without taking account of Donna Franklin's powerful insights, meticulous scholarship and acute analysis. This invaluable scholarly work ought to dispel many of the ideological myths surrounding these subjects." -Professor Roger Wilkins, George Mason University

One of the most important contributions to the study of the black family in recent years." - The Washington Post

Ensuring Inequality, along with Wilson's When Work Disappears, may be among the leading intellectual salvos in a public policy battle in which it might be said that the liberals are striking back." -Chicago Tribune

For years, it has been within the University of Chicago sociological tradition to study factors influencing the development and transformation of immigrant and migrant families. This volume, developed and written by a former faculty member of that institution, illustrates the best of that tradition applied to African-American families." -Contemporary Psychology

Angela D. James is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Loyola Marymount University.

Preface to the Revised Edition ; Forward to the Hardcover Edition ; Introduction ; Part I ; Chapter One: Slavery: A Reexamination of Its Impact ; Chapter Two: Sharecropping and the Rural Proletariat ; Chapter Three: The African American Family in the Maternalistic Era ; Chapter Four: The Arduous Transition to the Industrial North ; Part II ; Chapter Five: World War II and Its Aftermath ; Chapter Six: The Calm before the Storm ; Chapter Seven: The <"Matriarchal>" Black Family under Siege ; Chapter Eight: Family Composition and the <"Underclass>" Debate ; Chapter Nine: Black Marriage Patterns: Representations and Realities ; Chapter Ten: Where Are We Now? Where Do We Go from Here? ; Notes ; Index