My dissertation is an archival and ethnographic study of Black working-class women’s ethical and religious praxes used to advocate for improved labor conditions in Charleston, SC, from the 1930s to the present.
 
Until recently, academic studies on religion, ethics, and labor rights have historically focused on White Americans. Even with recent scholarly work on Black women and their work lives, the role of religion and morals in Black women’s perceptions of their work remains understudied. By attending to the current historical, cultural, gendered, and religious influences on labor in Charleston, I seek to render these women visible in religious studies (and labor studies). I contend that their beliefs and practices resist classification as cheap workers and construct a communally imagined, operated, and achieved understating for equitable pay and working conditions.
 
My archival work begins with interrogating institutional records, newspaper articles, personal diaries, photos, union paraphernalia, and oral histories of the 1933 Bagging Mill Strike, the 1945 Cigar Factory Strike, and the 1969 Hospital Worker Strike. Black women workers were vital participants and union leaders in these movements, but the strikes were (at best) marginally profitable—and (at worst) failures. However, in these strikes, Black women workers used religious practices (such as singing, praying, preaching, and testifying) and ethical practices such as self-determining terms of their work and critiquing the double standards of federal and state labor codes. As an ethnographer, I will work part-time in a working-class job in the Charleston peninsula for one year and be immersed in my research participants’ daily work and religious activities to show how Black working-class women presently use everyday and liminal practices to resist inequitable pay and working conditions.