Happiness in African-American women's relationships depends on employment opportunities and financial independence, a speaker said Tuesday.
About 30 people attended Dr. Averil Clarke's lecture "On Love and Equality: The Racial Causes, Class Consequences and Gendered Meanings of Romance Deprivation" in the Women's Resource Center.
Clarke, an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Yale University, discussed the reproductive patterns of African-American women and how education affects this group's status in society.
She said women who have a chance at higher education are able to make more rational decisions about their relationships and, accordingly, childbearing, because they are more aware of the benefits of contraception.
"As the level of education goes up, the number of births goes down," she said.
She explained that education also opens the door to a wider and better range of employment opportunities, allowing women to leave home for school or work and not remain stuck in the same area.
"Black women who moved a lot were a lot less likely to be romantically involved, while women who stayed in the same area tended to be in relationships," Clark said.
Childbearing is the last thing that the modern woman has to think about if she is concentrating on graduate school, work or monetary issues, she said.
However, impoverished areas with high mortality rates make childbearing a more pressing issue for women who wish to have "three generations of their family alive at the same time," Clarke said.
Clarke said that many unmarried black mothers face life with a can-do attitude that encourages them to balance extra hours of work, child rearing and taking care of household chores.
But this attitude also puts women in an unhealthy cycle of being overworked and emotionally deprived, she said.
Clarke said that many black women she studied seem to fall under several categories of romantically deprived relationships.
She said couples date from time to time over a period of several years and therefore limit themselves because of the convenience of the other person's availability.
A sleeper relationship, or "booty call," can result in multiple offspring with multiple fathers, or the archetypal "baby-daddy" crisis where the mother cannot identify each child's father, she said.
Romantic undesirability occurs when issues of race affect a potential relationship, such as a white man refusing to date a black woman for fear of his acquaintances' reaction to the match, she said
Romantic deprivation also occurs when matters of chastity arise. Clarke said sex before marriage opposes the values many black women hold, causing the interest in non-marital intimacy to decrease.
Attendees said they found Clarke's analysis of romantic inequality interesting.
College of Arts and Sciences freshman Gilli Safdeye said she was particularly drawn to the correlation between relationships and childbearing rates.
College of Communication freshman Ashley Acuña said she learned the media's role in romantic inequality.
"Television sitcoms seem to always be picking on unmarried black women about not knowing their children's fathers," she said. "The media does not take the hardships of uneducated black women seriously."
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
