Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The courage and vigor with which African-American women fought for their freedom during and after the Civil War are firmly at the center of this
groundbreaking study. Focusing on slave women on the rice plantations
of lowcountry South Carolina, Leslie Schwalm offers a thoroughly researched account of their vital roles in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery, and their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of war while redefining life and labor in the postbellum period.
Freedwomen fiercely asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed for white employers and in their own homes. They rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded prerogatives gained under a slave economy, and defended their vision of freedom against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction.
Synopsis
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.
Table of Contents
"Women always did this work" : slave women and plantation labor -- "Ties to bind them all together" : the social and reproductive labor of slave women -- "A hard fight for we" : slave women and the Civil War -- "Without mercy" : the end of war and the final destruction of lowcountry slavery -- "The simple act of emancipation : the first year of freedom -- "In their own way" -- women and work in the postbellum South -- "And so to establish family relations" : race, gender, and family in the postbellum crisis of free labor.