A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina Contributor(s): Schwalm, Leslie A. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0252066308 ISBN-13: 9780252066306 Publisher: University of Illinois Press OUR PRICE: $36.63 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: July 1997 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - History | United States - 19th Century - Social Science | Ethnic Studies - African American Studies - History | Women |
Dewey: 975.700 |
LCCN: 96045866 |
Series: Women in American History |
Physical Information: 0.95" H x 6.03" W x 8.96" (1.23 lbs) 424 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - Southeast U.S. - Ethnic Orientation - African American - Geographic Orientation - South Carolina |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |