To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

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Description

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–to be able 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. In any case, we be aware 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.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 might have signaled the end of slavery, but the beginning of freedom remained far out of sight for many of the four million enslaved African Americans living in the South. Even after the Civil War, when thousands of former slaves flocked to southern cities looking for work, they found the demands placed on them as wage-earners disturbingly very similar to those they had faced as slaves: seven-day workweeks, endless labor, and poor remedy. In To ‘Joy My Freedom, creator Tera W. Hunter takes a close look at the lives of black women in the post-Civil War South and draws some interesting conclusions. Hunter’s interest in the subject was once first of all sparked by her research of the washerwomen’s strike of 1881. This labor protest by more than 3,000 Atlanta laundresses is symbolic, Hunter posits, of African American women’s ability to build communities and practice effective, if rough-and-ready, political strategies outside the mainstream electoral system.

To ‘Joy My Freedom is a fascinating look at the long-neglected story of black women in postwar southern culture. Hunter examines the strategies these women (98 percent of whom worked as domestic servants) used to cope with low wages and poor working conditions and their efforts to master the tools of advancement, including literacy. Hunter explores not only the political, but the cultural, too, offering an in-depth look at the distinctive music, dance, and theater that grew out of the black experience in the South.

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