To ’Joy My Freedom

Bound in Wedlock

Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

Tera W. Hunter

Winner of the Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History Winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize Winner of the Littleton-Griswold Prize Winner of the Mary Nickliss Prize Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Prize Americans have long viewed marriage between a white man and a white woman as a sacred union. But marriages between African Americans have seldom been treated with the same reverence. This discriminatory legacy traces back to centuries of slavery, when the overwhelming majority of black married couples were bound in servitude as well as wedlock, but it does not end there. Bound in Wedlock is the first comprehensive history of African American marriage in the nineteenth century. Drawing from plantation records, legal documents, and personal family papers, it reveals the many creative ways enslaved couples found to upend white Christian ideas of marriage. “A remarkable book... Hunter has harvested stories of human resilience from the cruelest of soils... An impeccably crafted testament to the African-Americans whose ingenuity, steadfast love and hard-nosed determination protected black family life under the most trying of circumstances.” —Wall Street Journal “In this brilliantly researched book, Hunter examines the experiences of slave marriages as well as the marriages of free blacks.” —Vibe “A groundbreaking history... Illuminates the complex and flexible character of black intimacy and kinship and the precariousness of marriage in the context of racial and economic inequality. It is a brilliant book.” —Saidiya Hartman, author of Lose Your Mother

To ’Joy My Freedom

Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

Tera W. Hunter

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.

Labor Histories

Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience

Eric Arnesen, Julie Greene, Bruce Laurie

Is class outmoded as a basis for understanding labor history? This collection emphatically answers, "No!" These thirteen essays delve into subjects like migrant labor, religion, ethnicity, agricultural history, and gender. Written by former students of preeminent labor figure and historian David Montgomery, the works advance the argument that class remains indispensable to the study of working Americans and their place in the broad drama of our shared national history.

African American Labor History

A Survey of the Scholarship from Jim Crow to the New Millennium

Unknown author

The author surveys perspectives on African American and women laborers within the field of labor history, noting that black scholars initiated the field of African-American labor history at the turn of the twentieth century. The scholarship of W.E.B. DuBois is highlighted, which, focused on workers' experiences beyond the point of production, would later influence the "new labor history" of the post-World War II era. Following a survey of the development of African American labor history in the early 20th century, Hunter discusses how, in the period following World War II, the influence of the modern civil rights movement and the Black Power movement helped shift the focus of historical research from an earlier emphasis on trade unionism to social history and the labor history of African Americans and women. As the demarcations of the fields and sub-fields of social history in the 1960s advanced, the history of slavery would largely be treated separately from labor history, and the study of slavery mostly focused on non-work issues, Hay says. The author explores how new emphases on race and gender, in addition to class, divided the labor history field, as some feared the fragmentation of the discipline, leading to a national conference in 1984. Debates over race, gender, and class in labor history point to the persistent dilemmas that historians of the working-class continue to face in trying to negotiate analyses of these social relations. The greatest advances in rethinking the analytical categories, reformulating the paradigms, broadening the theoretical basis for the field, and expanding the subjects have come since 1980, Hunter notes, arguing that while the chicken-egg debate of race, class, and gender has not entirely abated, historians have also been able to move beyond it. Following the essay, a bibliography of recommended reading, a chronology of American American labor history from 1619 to 1997, and a glossary of historical persons, organizations, and movements are presented.

A Biographical Study of Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Unearthing One of the Many Brave

Tera W. Hunter, Duke University. Department of History

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Household Workers in the Making

Afro-American Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861 to 1920

Tera W. Hunter

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To ÕJoy My Freedom

Southern Black WomenÕs Lives and Labors After the Civil War

Tera W. Hunter

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.

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

Karen Cook Bell

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

A Hard Fight for We

Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina

Leslie A. Schwalm

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.

Closer to Freedom

Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South

Stephanie M. H. Camp

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday cont

Black Women in America

Darlene Clark Hine

Winner of the Dartmouth Medal for Outstanding Reference Publication of 1994, the first edition of Black Women in America broke ground - pulling together for the first time all of the research in this vast but underrepresented field to provide one of the strongest building blocks of Black Women's Studies. Hailed by Eric Foner of Columbia University (for a Lingua Franca survey) as "one of those publishing events which changes the way we look at a field," it simultaneously filled a void in the literature and sparked new research and concepts regarding African American women in history. Since the first edition was published, a new generation of American black women has flourished, demanding this landmark reference be brought up to date. Women such as Venus and Serena Williams, Condoleezza Rice, Carol Mosley-Braun, Ruth Simmons, and Ann Fudge have become household names for their remarkable contributions to sports, politics, academia, and business. In three magnificent volumes, Black Women in America, Second Edition celebrates the remarkable achievements of black women throughout history, highlights their ongoing contributions in America today, and covers the new research the first edition helped to generate. Features: * Includes more than 150 new entries, plus revisions and updates to all previous entries * Contains 500 illustrations, many published here for the first times * Includes over 335 biographies, many newly prepared for this publication * Offers sidebars on interesting aspects of the history and culture of black women * Provides a bibliography for each entry, plus a major bibliographical essay * Features a chronology and a comprehensive index For a complete listing of contents, visit www.oup.com/us/bwia

Black Women, Gender & Families

Unknown author

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