Post-Ghetto fabulous: coming to grips with black women's success.

• Author: Dickerson, Debra J.
• Position: Book Review

HAVING IT ALL? Black Women and Success by Veronica Chambers Doubleday, $23.95

WHEN IT COMES TO THE NATIONAL discourse, to be a black woman is to be that kid who moves to town the first week of February; you're going to get a fair number of Valentines, but your name will be misspelled and dutifully rendered in the handwriting of your new Classmates' moms. Black women, when not scapegoats--think: single parent homes, juvenile crime, and welfare--are after-thoughts. Black men's problems, we are to believe, are black people's problems.

Yet, without much public notice, black women have been taking care of business, and not primarily via lawsuit and bullhorn. As Woody Allen noted, 99 percent of success is just showing up--for application deadlines, for class, for birth-control pill refills, for each day on the job--and that is simply what black women have done. No magic. No treachery against black men. The continuing existence of racism, they deduced, is simply no reason not to try. According to Veronica Chambers in her new book, Having it All? Black Women and Succesi, "In a single generation, black women's lives have improved vastly on key fronts: professionally, academically, and financially." In recent decades, she reports, the number of African-American women earning bachelor's degrees has increased by three-quarters; the numbers attending law or graduate school have more than doubled. Between 1988 and 1998, the number of black families earning $100,000 or more almost doubled, driven largely by black women's increased earning power. While white women still outearn black women in management positions, according to a 1998 survey, black women are beginning to inch ahead in such fields as sales and administrative support roles.

Thankfully, as this not-so-new reality begins to seep into America's consciousness, works on black women that sidestep both the incomprehensible ghetto of women's studies and the "Girlfriend" aisle at Barnes & Noble are finally beginning to surface. In March 2002, The Washington Monthly published Paul Offner's analysis of the diverging fortunes of black men and women. Last month, Newsweek published a cover package on the black professional gender gap and its consequences. Eventually, all of America will have to notice that the American business district teems with black women in professional dress, however absent black men might be.

Having it All? operates as a social and cultural history of black women's portrayals in the...