The "Old Women's Home" in Freedman's Village: Age, Race, Disability, and US Citizenship in the Civil War Era

Harriet Jacobs, best known as the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, spent the Civil War worrying about elder care. She established an "Old Women's Home" in Freedman's Village, a camp for ex-slaves run by the US War Department in Alexandria, Virginia. While Federal officials classified "aged and infirm" women as a drain on government resources, Jacobs promoted a counter-narrative that emphasized women's intergenerational care as essential to free citizenship. Like many fugitives, she regarded the neglect of old people as among the worst features of slavery. She equated freedom with an investment in caring for old and disabled people, and relentlessly pushed government officials and private philanthropists to pay adequate wages to middle-aged care workers such as herself. She also stressed the ongoing capacities of old and disabled women, noting that secure housing allowed more able-bodied residents to care for the bedridden. Despite her success in establishing a women-run network of intergenerational care, government officials promoted a very different ideal of uncompensated care within patriarchal households. They trumpeted the achievement of Peter Grant, a sixty-five-year-old shoemaker with one leg, who was the first of hundreds of men to build and own a single-family home on land leased at low cost from the government. As is well-known, Congress soon abandoned plans to redistribute land to freedmen, thus undermining the patriarchal ideal. Jacobs' "Old Women's Home" represents a less well-known road not taken, as the government ultimately transferred aged and infirm women to Freedman's Hospital in Washington, DC, where they became patients waiting to die. Today, as America confronts a "care crisis" and advocacy organizations such as Caring Across Generations call for investment in a "care infrastructure," it is worth revisiting Jacobs' Black feminist model for reconstructing citizenship around middle-aged and old women's capacities for intergenerational care.