A Hard Fight For We
Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina
How Black women defined, embraced, and defended freedom
Paper – $37
978-0-252-06630-6
eBook – $29.95
978-0-252-05468-6
Publication Date
Paperback: 07/01/1997
About the Book
Focusing on Black women on the rice plantations of low country South Carolina, Leslie A. Schwalm offers an account of their vital roles in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. She also examines their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of war even as they redefined life and work in the postbellum period.As Schwalm shows, freedwomen asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed for white employers and at home. They rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded prerogatives they had gained, and defended their vision of freedom against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of landowners who sought to continue slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction.
About the Author
Leslie A. Schwalm is a professor and chair of Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Emancipation's Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest.Reviews
"A pleasure to read! Brimming with insight, prickly about assumptions too easily arrived at in earlier literature, briskly and pointedly written. Schwalm's book is a valuable intervention in the critical debate over the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South."--Stephanie McCurry, author of Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country"This compelling, well-documented work offers us an intriguing look at a particular group of black women and their struggles to work for themselves and their communities on their own terms. Clearly, it makes a significant contribution to Civil War and Reconstruction-era historiography."--Jacqueline Jones, author of The Dispossessed: America's Underclass from the Civil War to the Present
Awards
• Winner, Rose (Willie Lee) Publication Prize --(SAWH), 1998Related Titles
