In the 21st century, gender inequality is even more concentrated among African-American female-headed families with children younger than 5 years of age. This group accounts for the majority of American families in poverty. The condition of these female-headed families is more acute than that of the African girls in antebellum America, who made up the 70 percent of the work force that started working by the age of 7.
Today’s African-American female family heads do not live in nuclear families, they do not hold down steady full-time jobs and, unlike their antebellum African female family counterparts, they are more likely to have given birth to the first of their seven children before they graduated from high school and before they cast their first vote to elect any government officials to represent them.
