Intergenerational and community responsibility: Race uplift work in the retirement activities of professional African American women

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data with an overall sample of 50 retired African American professional women, this article examines their unpaid community work on behalf of disadvantaged Blacks. Using both feminist and life course perspectives, the article demonstrates how location and historical forces shaped their activities and their retirement scripts. Like educated women in previous generations, these Black retirees felt an obligation to do race uplift work and to give back to their communities, especially to Black youth. The resulting tension between retirement as a time of “freedom” and their sense of obligation to work on behalf of the needy contradicts middle-class male, white notions of retirement and highlights the need to recognize that there is not just one but multiple modes of retirement.