A Hard Fight for We

A Hard Fight for We
Author :
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Total Pages : 420
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780252054686
ISBN-13 : 0252054687
Rating : 4/5 (687 Downloads)

Book Synopsis A Hard Fight for We by : Leslie A. Schwalm

Download or read book A Hard Fight for We written by Leslie A. Schwalm and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2023-02-03 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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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