Introduction

Summary

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 postwar experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

Karen Cook Bell is Professor of History and the Wilson H. Elkins Endowed Professor at Bowie State University, Maryland. Her book Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America won the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society International Book Award in 2022.