A hard fight for we : women's transition from slavery to freedom in South Carolina / Leslie A. Schwalm.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Schwalm, Leslie A. (Leslie Ann), 1956-

Contributor:

Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books (University of Pennsylvania)

Series:

Women in American history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Enslaved women--South Carolina--History--19th century.

Enslaved women.

Plantation life--South Carolina--History--19th century.

Plantation life.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--South Carolina.

Enslaved persons.

African American women--South Carolina--History--19th century.

African American women.

History.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--British colonies.

Enslaved persons--Emancipation--French colonies.

South Carolina--History--Civil War, 1861-1865.

South Carolina.

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877)--South Carolina.

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877).

Penn Provenance:

Banks, Joanna (donor) (Banks Collection copy)

Physical Description:

xiii pages, 1 unnumbered page, 394 pages, 8 unnumbered pages, 8 pages of unnumbered plates : illustrations, map ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Summary:

The courage and vigor with which African-American women fought for their freedom during and after the Civil War are firmly at the center of this groundbreaking study. Focusing on slave women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, Leslie Schwalm offers a thoroughly researched account of their vital roles in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery, and their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of war while redefining life and labor in the postbellum period. Freedwomen fiercely asserted their own ideas of what freedom meant and insisted on important changes in the work they performed for white employers and in their own homes. They rejected the most unpleasant or demeaning tasks, guarded prerogatives gained under a slave economy, and defended their vision of freedom against unwanted intervention by Northern whites and the efforts of former owners to restore slavery's social and economic relations during Reconstruction.

Contents:

Part 1: Slavery. "Women always did this work": slave women and plantation labor. "Ties to bind them all together": the social and reproductive labor of slave women

Part 2: Slavery's Wartime Crisis. "A hard fight for we": slave women and the Civil War. "Without mercy": the end of war and the final destruction of lowcountry slavery

Part 3: Defining and Defending Freedom. "The simple act of emancipation": the first year of freedom . "In their own way": women and work in the postbellum South. "And so to establish family relations": race, gender, and family in the postbellum crisis of free labor.

Notes:

Publisher's advertisements: [2] pages at end.

"Cover photo: #3860, New Hampshire Historical Society."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 363-382) and index.

Winner of the Willie Lee Rose Publication Prize given by the Southern Association for Women Historians.

Local Notes:

Kislak Center Banks Collection copy presented to the Penn Libraries in 2018 by Joanna Banks.

ISBN:

0252022599

0252066308

OCLC:

35808344