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COPYRIGHT 2003 Bridgewater State College
Elizabeth Higginbotham. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC. 2001, 290 pp. (paperback) US$19.95.
Elizabeth Higginbotham's Too Much to Ask: Black Women in the Era of Integration (2001) provides a powerful and enlightening message about the lives and pioneering experiences of 12 middle-class and working-class women who helped to integrate American higher education in the post-civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The book is based on a study that followed the paths of 56 Black women who graduated from predominantly White colleges between the years 1968-1970. The women were contacted 6-8 years after graduation to complete follow-up surveys. Higginbotham focused her book on interviews with twelve out of the 56 women. At its heart, Too Much to Ask is poignant and compelling as it explores how social class, family practices and expectations prepared and influenced the lives and educational outcomes of Black women in the 1960s.
In the preface, Higginbotham writes about her experience in an era of integration as a working-class Black woman in 1971 while attending Brandeis University Graduate School. Higginbotham recalls that she was the only African American student in her class. The author briefly introduces the twelve interviewees, and notes that they had attended predominately White colleges in the same city in the 1960s.
Higginbotham states that her primary goal in writing the book is to "examine the complex lives of these women and develop a perspective that can help readers ask a series of questions to better understand the alternatives these women faced and to examine how people moved within varying social structures" (p. xi). These questions were: 1) What did being a Black person in a time of shifting racial dynamics mean for the course of these women's lives? 2) What was it like to be a pioneer in a predominately White college as the college attempted to change how it operated? 3) What obstacles and supports did social class differences create for women in their journeys through childhood, into college, and into their early adult lives? and 4) How did gender impact Black women raised with certain expectations within the Black community and exposed to different expectations in predominately White colleges?" (p. xi). The background and experiences of these women were different. But they all shared the common experience of being outsiders. As Higginbotham writes, they were "looking for a way through the institutional and interpersonal obstacles to their successful passage through the educational system" (p. xii).
Organized in 10 chapters, Too Much to Ask allows the reader to discover the lives of these trailblazing Black women. The first four chapters provide the foundation for understanding the lives of Blacks growing up in working-class and middle-class backgrounds in the 1950s and 1960s, and dealing with racial prejudice and discrimination. Higginbotham also explores how economic differences can result in residential and educational alternatives....
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