University of Illinois Press

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Author:

Leslie A. Schwalm

Pub Date:

1997

Pages:

424 pages

Series:

Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History

Southern History & Culture Labor Studies History, Am.: 19th C. African American Studies History, Am.: Civil War Women & Gender Studies See all Subjects

A Hard Fight for We

Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina

Awards and Recognition:

Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Publication Prize, the Southern Association of Women Historians, 1998.

How African American women defined, embraced, and defended freedom

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.

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"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

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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.

University of Illinois