Matriarchs and Troubling Friends: Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Moynihan Report

Matriarchs and Troubling Friends: Toni Morrison’s Sula and the Moynihan Report

This essay reads Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel Sula as a critical response to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report “The Negro Family” as well as to the various lines of criticism the report received. Blaming black female-headed households and the absence of black fathers for causing poverty in African American communities, the Moynihan Report provoked great controversy during the 1960s and 1970s. Although many black activists and writers were galvanized in opposition to the report’s racism and sexism, some of their critiques turned out to be problematic. This essay shows how some responses to the report reinforced white regulations imposed on black women, denied the possibility of black women serving as heads of families, celebrated black women’s resistance without delving into the underlying reasons, and dismissed the political importance of bonds between black women. By portraying two starkly different kinds of female-headed households and a disruptive friendship between two black women, Morrison’s Sula criticizes the Moynihan Report and addresses its problematic reception by recognizing and complicating the figure of the black matriarch, exposing the structural discrimination that makes black women suffer and black families disintegrate in the first place, and proposing the feminist political work that uneasy black female friendships can launch.