Honestly and thoughtfully conceived, Limited Choices celebrates the life of the authors? deeply-influential caregiver, Mabel Jones. Through comprehensive social historical research, in-depth interviews and powerful personal examples, this book illuminates the need for economic justice if we are ever going to achieve a racially just society, one in which everyone has choices about how and where they live their lives.
Jean Halley, Graduate Center, CUNY
Understanding Mable Jones?s working conditions in the North further elucidates the realities of Black migration. We understand more clearly the circumstances under which Black domestics maintained familial ties to the South and are made to realize that migration does not break bonds but can strengthen them. Consequently, Limited Choices can be read as a cogent synthesis of modern African American history.
From the foreword by Dr. Andrea Douglas, Executive Director, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center
This excellent book explores the intersections between race, class, and gender, as well as how additional variables such as location and time impact these dynamics. I appreciate the focus on the principal subject, Mable Jones, throughout this commendable book?even as the authors explore the context of her life and work and their own relationship with Mable Jones.
Brian J. Daugherit, Virginia Commonwealth University, coeditor of A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Documentary Account of the Struggle for School Desegregation in Prince Edward County, Virginia
The premise of Limited Choices is unique, and the book makes an important contribution to fields including labor studies, gender studies, African American studies, and American studies, to name a few.
Journal of Southern History
Abel and Nelson?s ability to trace Jones?s life from rural Virginia to Charlottesville to New York and back to Charlottesville is commendable. They not only illuminate the difficulties?and limited choices?of being a live-in domestic in the North, far from her southern home and family, but also Jones?s deep connection to her mother, sons, and marriage, and her commitment to children?s education, and to homeownership in an integrating and later gentrifying southern city from the 1950s through her death in 1995.
The Journal of American History
A recommended read for all Charlottesvillians
C-VILLE Weekly
