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

An insightful exploration of the complexity of Black women's wartime and postwar experiences across the American South.

Karen Cook Bell (Edited by)

9781316514757, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 21 December 2023

252 pages
23.5 x 15.5 x 1.8 cm, 0.498 kg

'Bringing together seasoned scholars of gender and African American history in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, this edited volume builds upon the new wave of scholarship… that views emancipation as a process and positions Black women as self-liberators, agents of change, and advocates for their own citizenship and rights … Through case studies, the authors of Southern Black Women show the numerous ways in which African American women struggled, resisted, and achieved their view of freedom (education, working from home, justice) across space and time. … to better understand the racial and gender violence that plagued the wartime and postwar eras, resistance tactics and communal networks women used, and, moreover, the long process of emancipation, Southern Black Women needs to be considered in classrooms and new scholarship moving forward.' Molly C. Mersmann, The Journal of the Civil War Era

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.

Introduction: black women during the civil war and reconstruction Karen Cook Bell
Part I. Emancipation and Black Women's Labor: 1. 'The proceeds of my own labor': black working women in the district of Columbia during the civil war Katherine Chilton
2. 'Please attend to it for me': single black women in civil war and reconstruction era Virginia Arlisha R. Norwood
3. 'I had time for myself': enslaved women, labor, and the politics of acquisition during the civil war Felicia Jamison
Part II. War, Gender Violence, and the Courts: 4. Black women, war, and freedom in Southern Louisiana and Low Country Georgia Karen Cook Bell
5. Rape and mutiny at Fort Jackson: black laundresses testify in civil war Louisiana Crystal Feimster
6. 'I told him to let me alone, that he hurt me': black women and girls and the battle over labor and sexual consent in union-occupied territory Kaisha Esty
Part III. Emancipation, the Black Family, and Education: 7. Making their place on the South's ragged edge: USCT women in Little Rock Kelly Houston Jones
8. Black women's lives and labors in post-emancipation North Carolina Brandi C. Brimmer
9. 'Remaking Old Blue College': Emerson Normal and addressing the need for public schoolteachers in Mobile Hilary Green.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]