THE FUSE

Being a historian requires me to constantly examine whose version of events we have chosen to tell. Who is doing the telling, and why? In the classic narrative of women leaving the kitchen for the workforce only to return home to a "second shift," the protagonist is presumed white, middle class, and married. But for many black women, there was no choice to leave the kitchen because they were employed as paid domestics or as wage earners their families relied upon. Then went home to their own kitchen. Rinse and repeat.