Book contents
- 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
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Emancipation and Black Women’s Labor
- 1 “The Proceeds of My Own Labor”
- 2 “Please Attend to It for Me”
- 3 “I Had Time for Myself”
- Part II War, Gender Violence, and the Courts
- Part III Emancipation, the Black Family, and Education
- Notes
- Index
1 - “The Proceeds of My Own Labor”
Black Working Women in the District of Columbia during the Civil War
from Part I - Emancipation and Black Women’s Labor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 December 2023
- 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
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Emancipation and Black Women’s Labor
- 1 “The Proceeds of My Own Labor”
- 2 “Please Attend to It for Me”
- 3 “I Had Time for Myself”
- Part II War, Gender Violence, and the Courts
- Part III Emancipation, the Black Family, and Education
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Kate Chilton’s chapter explores the unique experience of women in the District of Columbia and argues that Black women drew on women’s strong position in the urban economy to choose work that allowed them to help support their families and demand respect and reciprocal obligations from their husbands. The strategies practiced by African American women during and after emancipation reveal the continuities between the prewar and post–Civil War periods that made urban freedom in the District of Columbia different and distinct. Despite the dislocations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction and the attempts of agents of the Union Army and the Freedmen’s Bureau to impose Republican ideals on Black women, emancipation ultimately served to reinforce prewar patterns of gendered behavior in former slave households. While Black men experienced great demand for their labor during the war, the resumption of a peacetime employment market meant that the majority of Black women would have to work in freedom.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction , pp. 11 - 28Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023