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2 results

  • 8 - Black Women’s Lives and Labors in Post-Emancipation North Carolina

  • from Part III - Emancipation, the Black Family, and Education
  • Edited by Karen Cook Bell, Bowie State University
  • Book:
    Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction
    Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 141-159

  • Summary

    Brandi Brimmer follows the story of Fanny Whitney, an enslaved woman, who belonged to a community of men and women that was bound together by extended ties of kinship and other connections in Union-occupied areas of eastern North Carolina. Brimmer’s chapter pieces together the historical trajectory of widowhood for Black women in post–Civil War America. Using the case files of Fanny Whitney and other southern Black women who applied for survivors’ benefits after 1866, the year the federal government recognized “slave marriage” in pension law, this chapter asks what happened to the women and children Black soldiers depended on, left behind in freedmen’s camps, and reunited with after the war. Black women who were widows, she contends, pieced together their existence on a daily basis. Evidence from the pension files of Black Union widows in eastern North Carolina deepens our understanding of Black women’s lives and labors and sheds light on the ways they struggled to define widowhood for themselves. Brimmer expands the discourse regarding widowed Black women who used community and kinship networks to shape freedom.

Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Edited by Karen Cook Bell
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.