I Am Not Your Mammy: Care, Expectation & Invisible Labor Paperback – March 8, 2026

There is a woman the world has always known how to need.She is the one who stabilizes what others destabilize, nurtures what others neglect, and absorbs what no one else is willing to carry. She does not ask what it costs her — not because she doesn't feel the cost, but because she has been formed, over time and across every environment she has inhabited, to understand her value as inseparable from her availability. She is capable, dependable, and quietly disappearing into both.You know her. You may be her.I Am Not Your Mammy: Care, Expectation, & Invisible Labor is a formation-based examination of the invisible labor economy that Black women navigate across professional, familial, communal, and spiritual life. Drawing on scholarship in psychology, womanist theology, sociology, and leadership formation, Dr. Ella R. Thompson names the controlling images and cultural schemas that have long governed how Black women are perceived, conscripted, and consumed — and offers a disciplined, humane pathway toward reclamation.The book introduces four archetypes that Black women will recognize before the description is finished: the Mammy, the Strong Black Woman, the Elder Daughter, and the Clean Up Woman. These are not relics of another era. They are present-tense expectations — roles assigned by systems, families, and institutions, often without asking, almost always without adequate care for what sustaining them requires.This is not a book about suffering. It is a book about governance — specifically, about who has been governing a woman's capacity, and what becomes possible when she reclaims that authority for herself.Organized across three movements — Naming, Connecting, and Forming — the book moves the reader through recognition, then understanding, then the practical, irreversible work of formation. Not motivation. Not inspiration as a substitute for change. But the honest, sequential work of a woman who is done performing strength she never chose and is ready to build something that belongs to her.The question this book returns to across every chapter is both simple and disorienting: Who is governing your capacity — and did you give them permission?That question is not an accusation. It is an opening.I Am Not Your Mammy was written for Black women — for those heading toward a threshold they can feel but have not yet named, for those already standing at it, and for those on the other side who are still making sense of what they survived. It was also written for the men who love Black women and want to understand what they are witnessing, and for the leaders, educators, clergy, and practitioners who walk alongside Black women in any capacity and want to serve them with greater integrity and depth.This is the second volume in a four-movement formation series. It stands fully on its own. But for the reader ready for a sustained journey, it is part of a larger arc — one designed to take a woman from the interior work of identity all the way through to durable, transferable legacy.This book is not asking you to stop being strong. It is asking you to find out what you would be if strength were something you chose — every morning, on your own terms — rather than something that was required of you before you had the language to resist it.That is a different life. And it is entirely available to you. Read more