Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi
Journal article by Cam Walker; Journal of Southern History, Vol. 67, 2001
Journal Article Excerpt
Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi. by Cam Walker Freedom's Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi. By Noralee Frankel. Blacks in the Diaspora. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xviii, 270. $35.00, ISBN 0-253-33495-0.) Noralee Frankel's account of the experiences of African American women during the Civil War and the first five years of Reconstruction in Mississippi demonstrates yet again the value of gender as a category of historical analysis. Drawing from plantation records, manuscript collections, Freedmen's Bureau reports, and especially widows' petitions contained in the pension files of African American veterans, Frankel skillfully blends this material with the rich secondary literature on nineteenth-century Mississippi, thereby both complicating and enhancing a familiar story. By focusing on women in their myriad roles as workers, mothers, wives, lovers, friends, complainants, and petitioners and tracing their complex interactions with everyone from white landowners and Freedmen's Bureau officials to spouses, kin, and neighbors, she is able to offer new insights into such topics as the transition from enslaved to free labor, freedpeople's attitudes toward marriage, and the structure of the black family. Frankel finds both change and continuity in the lives she chronicles. Although she stresses black women's struggle for autonomy and privacy in work, child rearing, and intimate relations with men, she also recognizes the constraints imposed by race, poverty, and lack of political power. White men and women continued to exercise inordinate influence over the activities and choices of freedpeople. "Former slave owners," Frankel notes, "were quite relentless in finding means, including the power of local and state law, to control aspects of African American family life" (p. 144). Still, if few black women achieved the economic security they hoped for, most did manage to reduce the amount of time they worked for whites. Black women influenced the shift of their family's labor from slavery to sharecropping, and in so doing they developed independent views of legal and informal marriages. Moreover, Frankel argues persuasively that, with emancipation, the African American family emerged as a "male-headed" institution rather than a genuinely patriarchal one (p. xii). The topical organization of Freedom's Women produces some repetition--Frankel defines "took-ups" (informal marriages) and "quitting" (non-legal divorce) several times--that robs the book of narrative drive. But Frankel does include incidents from individual women's lives to illustrate her broad themes; for example, she follows the story of Lucy Brown from her days as a slave in Bolivar County through the wartime contraband camps to freedom, with special attention to her marriages, love affairs, children, and friends. Frankel thus reminds her readers of the real people who shaped and were shaped by the events of these years. Freedom's Women closes on an appropriately muted note. The successes of African American women (and men) between 1862 and 1870 were, Frankel acknowledges, "incomplete" (p. 180). That certainly cannot be said of Frankel's book, however, for her close examination of the gains and losses of these black women and their families as they moved from slavery to freedom contributes to a fuller, more nuanced understanding of that crucial transition. -1- |
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