Karen Cook Bell’s recent edited collection situates race and gender as critical to mapping freedom and resistance within Civil War and Reconstruction history. By centering individual and collective struggles for legal, political, and economic rights, these authors demonstrate how Black women’s freedom-making efforts forged national patterns in pursuing and realizing emancipation. Drawing on diverse sources, such as military records, pension files, legal testimony, and institutional archives, they employ methodologies that foreground everyday resistance, intimate life, and intersectional analysis. Collectively, the authors focus on everyday interactions by southern Black women across society—in their communities, with the military, with local and federal agencies—as a part of wider emancipation efforts. When W. E. B. Du Bois positioned the relation between enslaved people and the Civil War as an ongoing economic revolt in Black Reconstruction in America (1935), his work did not examine or incorporate questions of gender in any significant way. This collection compels a rethinking of resistance and freedom-making itself as one grounded in Black women’s labor choices, refusals, and institutional strategies. This reading not only complements Cook Bell’s original framing, which centers the complex lived experiences of southern Black women and their struggle to shape “freedom’s boundaries” amid the persistence of “unfreedoms,” but also further clarifies the collection’s deeper historiographical contributions (7).Marking a critical intervention, the collection builds on previous scholarship that centers race and gender. LeeAnn Whites’s The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender (1995), Leslie Schwalm’s A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (1997), Carol Faulkner’s Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (2004), Stephanie M. H. Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the South (2004), and many others (too long a list to reproduce here) shifted the historical focus toward Black women’s experiences throughout the Civil War and Reconstruction. Specifically, they navigated, resisted, and redefined labor, citizenship, and domestic life in their everyday, intimate, and embodied acts of freedom-making. In addition, recent works like Stephanie McCurry’s Women’s War (2019) and Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight (2019) continue to challenge older narratives that center formal politics and large-scale economic transformations, demonstrating how everyday acts by women were critical in shaping military and politics.Cook Bell divides the nine essays into three sections: Part I, “Emancipation and Black Women’s Labor”; Part II, “War, Gender Violence, and the Courts”; and Part III, “Emancipation, the Black Family, and Education.” The book’s contribution to labor history falls along two major analytical axes: labor refusal as political resistance; and collective redefinitions of freedom-making. These categories clarify how Black women’s choices about work and their efforts to claim rights and shape institutions were not merely reactive but constituted active, strategic engagements in building new meanings of freedom and belonging. Situating southern Black women’s labor and refusal as political resistance reveals how individual and collective redefinitions of freedom shaped national understandings of emancipation.The essays by Katherine Chilton, Felicia Jamison, and Karen Cook Bell showcase how the ability to refuse and choose forms and sites of labor shaped the political resistance of southern Black women. For example, Cook Bell’s essay on coastal Louisiana and Georgia reveals how land ownership represented material manifestations of independence and gave new meaning to self-emancipation. Here freedom-making often included both visions of property-owning and embodied acts. By challenging the disposition that land acquisition was indicative of Black manhood, Cook Bell argues that both projects depended on Black women’s labor and their extended community and economic networks. First, her essay demonstrates how visions of and efforts toward property-owning took form across gendered bodies and spaces. Second, conversations about negotiations of nonsexual labor often paralleled resistance to sexual exploitation and assertions of bodily autonomy. Crystal Feimster and Kaisha Esty underscore racially gendered violence as a critical experience of emancipation. Esty’s essay showcases how Black women navigated and leveraged newly available legal provisions in their struggles against racial and sexual injustice. Sometimes, they won legal justice within Union army courts, but records indicate that Black women disproportionately suffered from sexual violence by white soldiers and continued to labor under sexually vulnerable conditions. When read together, gendered sexual exploitation and resistance rendered southern Black girls and women’s understanding of everyday labor and economic freedoms as inseparable from political action.Moreover, southern Black women often recognized and shaped their freedoms as collective endeavors. Arlisha Norwood and Brandi Brimmer reveal the successes and limits Black women faced when negotiating their rights with state agencies and organizations. Brimmer’s essay underscores how southern Black women crafted their own meanings, definitions, and functions of widowhood in New Bern, a free Black community in postwar North Carolina. Negotiating within both the local pension network and the complexities of a broader, national federal bureaucracy, their ability to claim financial relief provided income and peace of mind, even if the process and reality of receiving the pension was uneven and flawed. In other instances, southern Black women often (re)directed their labor toward the making of Black institutions. Kelly Houston Jones and Hilary Green demonstrate how collective activism and community-building coalesced into strategic alliances. Green’s essay on the American Missionary Association in Mobile, Alabama, emphasizes how critical Black community members’ petitioning was to establishing Emerson Normal School, which allowed Black individuals to acquire teaching degrees. Through a collective determination toward achieving education and literacy, Green reveals how Black women formed alliances with religious and benevolent organizations to achieve their freedom dreams and visions of the future. Often southern Black women leveraged their roles as women—wives, widows, and community members—to realize their labor choices and rights in emancipation.Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom During the Civil War and Reconstruction forces readers to reconsider where and how we map Black labor resistance. In her 2024 presidential address for the American Historical Association, Thavolia Glymph asked “how different the history and remembrances of the Civil War might look if we considered the sites of the slaves’ wars as battlegrounds” (“The Irretrievable Past?,” 7). In this sense, Cook Bell’s collection foregrounds the sites where, as Glymph put it, “Black women documented their desires and sense of freedom and power” (“The Irretrievable Past?,” 5). In contributing to a history of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, these authors center experiences of how southern Black women encountered freedoms and unfreedoms in their everyday intimate lives and, though frequently overlooked and silenced in the historical archive, played a critical part in realizing emancipation on a national scale. This racially gendered reading of labor resistance stresses questions of whose labor, whose resistance, and which voices defined—and continues to define—collective freedom on a national scale.
Leah Chen (Fri,) studied this question.