Arlisha Norwood examines a special category of women, those who temporarily or permanently could be classified as “single” in Virginia. This chapter argues that this population which includes unmarried, divorced, widowed, abandoned and separated women were the most economically vulnerable group during and after the war. Despite the unique obstacles they faced, single Black women asserted their needs, worked together to prevent destitution, and challenged the agendas of governmental agencies and private organizations whose well-meaning intentions often clashed with their own expectations. Their petitions for support and compensation altered the roles and responsibilities of federal and local agencies and made these women prominent characters in defining freedom, welfare, citizenship, and womanhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Karen Cook Bell interrogates how Black women in Louisiana and Georgia used Freedmen’s Bureau courts and their knowledge of the landscape to make their own freedom. In both regions, low wages and legal battles placed formerly enslaved women at a disadvantage; however, their labor aided their families and communities. Through the “contract labor system” in Louisiana and access to abandoned lands in Georgia, these women were able to improve their conditions in the short term. While some freedpeople derived marginal economic benefits from wage labor in the immediate aftermath of the war, in Louisiana these newly emancipated women were persistent in their demands for full and fair compensation from the Bureau of Free Labor, which adjudicated a significant number of cases in their favor.