Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009092138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009092138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

A Hard Fight for We

A Hard Fight for We PDF Author: Leslie A. Schwalm
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252054687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
African-American women fought for their freedom with courage and vigor during and after the Civil War. Leslie Schwalm explores the vital roles of enslaved and formerly enslaved women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, both in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. From there, she chronicles their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of the war while redefining their lives and labor. Freedwomen asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed both for white employers and in their own homes. As Schwalm shows, these women rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded the prerogatives they gained under the South's slave economy, and defended their hard-won freedoms against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction. A bold challenge to entrenched notions, A Hard Fight for We places African American women at the center of the South's transition from a slave society.

To ’Joy My Freedom

To ’Joy My Freedom PDF Author: Tera W. Hunter
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674264630
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta—the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south—in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers’ domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization. Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post–Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception—and at the heart—of the new south.

Running from Bondage

Running from Bondage PDF Author: Karen Cook Bell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108831540
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
A compelling examination of the ways enslaved women fought for their freedom during and after the Revolutionary War.

Climbing Up to Glory

Climbing Up to Glory PDF Author: Wilbert L. Jenkins
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742573869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The Civil War was undeniably an integral event in American history, but for African Americans, whose personal liberties were dependent upon its outcome, it was an especially critical juncture. The Union defeat of the Confederacy brought African Americans a simultaneous victory over their captors, freeing them from slavery and domination and establishing them as masters of their own fate. But African Americans were far from passive victims of the war. Black soldiers fought on both sides of the conflict_Union and Confederate. In Climbing Up to Glory: A Short History of African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Wilbert L. Jenkins explores this defining period in a story that documents the journey of average African Americans as they struggled to reinvent their lives following the abolition of slavery. In this highly readable book, Jenkins examines the unflagging determination and inner strength of African Americans as they sought to construct a solid economic base for themselves and their families by establishing their own businesses and banks and strove to own their own land. He portrays the racial violence and other obstacles blacks endured as they pooled meager resources to institute and maintain their own schools and attempted to participate in the political process. The family unit was also impacted by these profound societal changes. During this tumultuous time, African Americans struggled to rebuild families torn apart by slavery and to legalize family relationships such as slave marriages that were previously deemed unlawful. Compelling and informative, Climbing Up to Glory is an unforgettable tribute to a glowing period in African-American history sure to enrich and inspire American and African-American history enthusiasts.

Freedom's Women

Freedom's Women PDF Author: Noralee Frankel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
"Frankel's scholarship in this carefully researched and clearly written study is impressive.... The study is thoroughly documented with 70 pages of footnotes and a 14-page bibliography, refleccting Frankel's grasp of the secondary literature as well as extensive work in primary documents." -- Choice Freedom's Women examines African American women's experiences during the Civil War and early Reconstruction years in Mississippi. Exploring issues of family and work, the author shows how African American women's attempts to achieve more control over their lives shaped their attitudes toward work, marriage, family, and community.

Black Reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois)

Black Reconstruction in America (The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois) PDF Author: W. E. B. Du Bois
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019938567X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1134

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Book Description
W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. Black Reconstruction in America tells and interprets the story of the twenty years of Reconstruction from the point of view of newly liberated African Americans. Though lambasted by critics at the time of its publication in 1935, Black Reconstruction has only grown in historical and literary importance. In the 1960s it joined the canon of the most influential revisionist historical works. Its greatest achievement is weaving a credible, lyrical historical narrative of the hostile and politically fraught years of 1860-1880 with a powerful critical analysis of the harmful effects of democracy, including Jim Crow laws and other injustices. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by David Levering Lewis, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history.

Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore PDF Author: Laura F. Edwards
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252072185
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Establishing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and political rights in ways that highlight women's active political role throughout the nineteenth century. She draws on diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, government records, legal documents, court proceedings, and other primary sources to explore the experiences and actions of individual women in the changing South, demonstrating how family, kin, personal reputation, and social context all merged with gender, race, and class to shape what particular women could do in particular circumstances.

Gender and the Jubilee

Gender and the Jubilee PDF Author: Sharon Romeo
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820348015
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
CHAPTER 5 The Legacy of Slave Marriage: Freedwomen's Marital Claims and the Process of Emancipation -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W

Stepdaughters of History

Stepdaughters of History PDF Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807164585
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
In Stepdaughters of History, noted scholar Catherine Clinton reflects on the roles of women as historical actors within the field of Civil War studies and examines the ways in which historians have redefined female wartime participation. Clinton contends that despite the recent attention, white and black women’s contributions remain shrouded in myth and sidelined in traditional historical narratives. Her work tackles some of these well-worn assumptions, dismantling prevailing attitudes that consign women to the footnotes of Civil War texts. Clinton highlights some of the debates, led by emerging and established Civil War scholars, which seek to demolish demeaning and limiting stereotypes of southern women as simpering belles, stoic Mammies, Rebel spitfires, or sultry spies. Such caricatures mask the more concrete and compelling struggles within the Confederacy, and in Clinton’s telling, a far more balanced and vivid understanding of women’s roles within the wartime South emerges. New historical evidence has given rise to fresh insights, including important revisionist literature on women’s overt and covert participation in activities designed to challenge the rebellion and on white women’s roles in reshaping the war’s legacy in postwar narratives. Increasingly, Civil War scholarship integrates those women who defied gender conventions to assume men’s roles—including those few who gained notoriety as spies, scouts, or soldiers during the war. As Clinton’s work demonstrates, the larger questions of women’s wartime contributions remain important correctives to our understanding of the war’s impact. Through a fuller appreciation of the dynamics of sex and race, Stepdaughters of History promises a broader conversation in the twenty-first century, inviting readers to continue to confront the conundrums of the American Civil War. “Spies, smugglers, nurses, plantation mistresses, liberators of slaves, traders, writers, freedom fighters, wives, and mothers—Catherine Clinton considers the many roles of diverse groups of southern women from the Civil War to the late nineteenth century in these lively and provocative essays.”—Jacqueline Jones, author of Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present “Clinton's sweeping synthesis is a timely call for rethinking women's roles in the Civil War. Her panoramic view of the existing scholarship, her revealing new histories, and the questions that she raises for the future offer a rich scholarly feast that is useful for undergraduates and seasoned historians alike.”—Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History, Yale University “Stepdaughters of History is a timely treatise on the legacy of the Civil War and how Americans both remember and forget the women who dreamt and helped build the landscape with which we reside. The writing is accessible and engaging. Clinton integrates gender studies, political history, and current events into this slim volume and challenges us to continue to build a Civil War historiography that is full and more honest.”—Deirdre Cooper-Owens, professor of history, Queens College, CUNY “Catherine Clinton delights in disentangling the ambiguities and contradictions of the experiences of southern women, whether they were free or enslaved or rich or poor, in Stepdaughters of History. In this beautifully written volume, she explores how the field of Civil War history has demolished the Lost Cause shibboleths of the devoted mammy and the submissive plantation mistress. Clinton reminds us that history should never offer the comfort of a bedtime story, and in Stepdaughters of History there is plenty for us to ponder late into the night.”—Peter Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute and author of The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion