Black Women’s Political Culture and the "State" of Reconstruction

Over the past three decades, historical scholarship has analyzed Black women’s Reconstruction-era political culture to illuminate freedwomen’s claims-making and their grassroots political practices. From carefully drawing attention to how freedwomen gained control of their intimate lives and organized their households in the years following the war to analyzing the implications of Black women’s pursuit of bodily autonomy and economic survival in free-labor society, this scholarship has transformed how scholars conceptualize the reshaping of gender, race, labor, and political culture after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the U.S. This essay synthesizes insights from Elsa Barkley Brown’s “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere,” (1994); Tera Hunter’s To Joy My Freedom (1997); Hannah Rosen’s Terror in the Heart of Freedom (2009); Mary Farmer-Kaiser’s Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau (2010); Kate Masur’s “Patronage and Protest in Kate Brown’s Washington” (2013); Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight (2020); and my own Claiming Union Widowhood (2020). It pays close attention to how the historiography developed to understand the relationship between Black women’s grassroots practices and the state in post-emancipation politics. It also considers how new scholarship on Black legal culture in the nineteenth century has informed historians’ conceptualization of Black women’s participation in Reconstruction-era politics.