To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War [Paperback]

Tera W. Hunter (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674893085 | ISBN-13: 978-0674893085 | Publication Date: September 15, 1998

As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization.

Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs. We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally, we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring women to migrate north.

Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry of the culture and experience of black women workers in the post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception--and at the heart--of the new south.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 might have signaled the end of slavery, but the beginning of freedom remained far out of sight for most of the four million enslaved African Americans living in the South. Even after the Civil War, when thousands of former slaves flocked to southern cities in search of work, they found the demands placed on them as wage-earners disturbingly similar to those they had faced as slaves: seven-day workweeks, endless labor, and poor treatment. In To 'Joy My Freedom, author Tera W. Hunter takes a close look at the lives of black women in the post-Civil War South and draws some interesting conclusions. Hunter's interest in the subject was initially sparked by her research of the washerwomen's strike of 1881. This labor protest by more than 3,000 Atlanta laundresses is symbolic, Hunter posits, of African American women's ability to build communities and practice effective, if rough-and-ready, political strategies outside the mainstream electoral system.

To 'Joy My Freedom is a fascinating look at the long-neglected story of black women in postwar southern culture. Hunter examines the strategies these women (98 percent of whom worked as domestic servants) used to cope with low wages and poor working conditions and their efforts to master the tools of advancement, including literacy. Hunter explores not only the political, but the cultural, too, offering an in-depth look at the distinctive music, dance, and theater that grew out of the black experience in the South. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Hunter (history, Carnegie Mellon Univ.) examines the rich dimensions of the lives of ordinary black Southern women, who were mainly confined to household labor as maids, nannies, cooks, and washerwomen in urban centers from the postbellum era through the Great Migration during World War I. In Atlanta, these freedwomen "were committed to balancing the need to earn a living with needs for emotional sustenance, personal growth, and collective cultural experience." Hunter offers valuable explorations into the complexities of African American feminine laborers and the contextualization of their lives. She is to be applauded for providing scholars with easier access to source materials, particularly primary sources. An important contribution to suffragist activism, feminist scholarship, and African American studies.?Edward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast, Long Beach
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 322 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674893085
• ISBN-13: 978-0674893085
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #47,173 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #32 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > History
  • #66 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Nonfiction

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A worthy read, November 26, 2000

By 

L. Naylor "reading mom" (VA, United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Paperback)

Although it is not perfect, Hunter provides an engrossing look at southern black women's labor (especially in Atlanta) from the end of the Civil War to the Great Migration. With emancipation, these women searched for identity as free women, as paid workers, and as African Americans. White woutherners developed institutions and laws to restrict the newfound freedom black southerners sought to enjoy. Black women workers responded through community awareness and activism, showing intelligence and the desire to better their lives. Hunter's innovative use of sources shapes her work and helps the women's voices come alive. Because of limited African-Americal literacy in the early Reconstruction period, Hunter turned to newspapers and white southners' diaries fo flesh-out black women's experiences. Although problematic, the attention given in them to black women domestics demonstrated the division of both race and gender. Hunter also incorporates unique sources like dance steps so show the many ways newly freed women sought to define themselves. Her haunting use of illustrations reinforces the oppression and struggle for freedom black women laborers faced. As someone who knew very little about this aspect of history, Hunter's work has developed my interest in this time.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars African-American History, May 7, 2009

By 

J. Morris (Richmond, VA.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Paperback)

A wonderful book for anyone interested in women's rights and the struggles they have endured over the years for pay equity and equality. This book traces the newly freed slave women; their battle to survive on the paltry sums ex-slave masters paid them, the women's determination to organize strikes for a living wage. This book also depicts the efforts for control over the very bodies of ex-slave women even down to efforts to restrict their right to dance and 'joy their Freedom. The consensus that partying and dancing would restrict the women's ability to do a good day's work. But the truth was the desire to control and re-enslave these women by controlling their very bodies.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and Engaging, April 27, 2011

By 

EPoole - See all my reviews

This review is from: To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Paperback)

For those of you who were tantalized by the community, culture, and hints of deeper history in Kathryn Stockett's recent bestseller The Help, Tera W. Hunter's To `Joy My Freedom provides an intellectually stimulating and readable history of black women's urban work and politics in the American South following the Civil War. It provides a full-bodied history of the dynamics that seem so well-established in The Help. Stockett's work narrates the dynamics between black and white Southern women in the 1960s and the complexities that labor added to those habits, but leaves the intrigued reader begging for more of the history behind those relational and economic dynamics. Hunter's historical work, centering on the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen's strike, creates a groundbreaking context for an examination of black females' efforts to create independent political, cultural, economic and labor identities in the postbellum South.
Tera Hunter's work, published in 1997, collects personal diaries, newspaper articles, court documents, letters, statistics, political cartoons, bank statements, early photographs and other primary documentation, in addition to secondary sources, to craft the first narrative of these southern black women's lives. Her excellent source work not only grants a new in-road to the academic study of this generation, but also gives depth to the stories of the women themselves. Hunter's sources enable her work to sufficiently challenge the historian reader yet remain accessible to the general reader. Divided thematically and chronologically, Hunter explores the development of black female social culture, class conflict, racial segregation, political independence, and political action, identifying key cultural, political, and labor developments of the eight-decade period between Appomattox and the Great Migration. Hunter suggests that involvement in the post-War Republican Party and establishment of hierarchically organized black social clubs, called mutual aid, benevolent associations, or secret societies, taught newly-freed southern blacks the patterns of group leadership and organization. This history, combined with the major contingent of black females working as domestic workers throughout the South, created a strong force of women. Hunter tells these women's stories for the first time.
Hunter's personal accounts indicate these women's deep struggle and the resilient strength on an unprecedented level. Her work is groundbreaking in its gift of voice to a generation of domestic workers who knew slavery personally and whose early fight for liberty strengthened the black community life that supported the second, and more noted, Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. She empowers the cultural identities previously unrecognized by historians, granting inherent value to her work through provision of new source materials and content regarding black, urban women. Hunter's book is personal. This element of its composition is, perhaps, its greatest strength. Not only does Hunter newly examine a subset of Southern culture, but she gives the women a strong voice through direct quotes drawn from her strong primary sourcework. Her book is a sturdy and inspiring. It fulfills the scholarly requirements of academia yet crafts a strong, honest narrative that can appeal to the educated reader. It is especially important for readers with an interest in racial and gender history in the United States.
Since I am such a reader, I recommend Hunter's book. It is certainly not a light read, with heavy data incorporation and a frustrating finish - one that begs inclusion of the mid-20th century Civil Rights movement. Yet, Hunter also leaves the reader extremely grateful for her hard work in excavating and exploring the new territory of urban, black female life in the South and, deeper still, a more complex understanding of the persistence of Southern black urban women. And for those whose interest in Stockett's The Help has propelled them to the end of this review, the domestic domain and subtle acts of rebellion in Stockett's 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, suddenly find themselves in the context of a larger, stronger historical group of black urban domestic working women. Regardless of your interest, however, Hunter's work is a worthwhile, educational, and engaging read.