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To 'Joy
My Freedom
Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors
after the Civil War
By Tera W. Hunter
Reviews
"The
Emancipation Proclamation did not bring freedom to the four
million African-Americans who lived in slavery in 1863. Instead,
blacks had to claim and define that freedom in tens of thousands
of acts of self-assertion during the decades that followed
slavery's legal demise.
To 'Joy
My Freedom vividly
depicts one neglected aspect of that struggle by focusing on the
lives of urban black women, in particular those who worked as
domestic laborers in the post-Civil War South."
--Drew Gilpin Faust, New
York Times Book Review
"Tera Hunter's
imaginative uncovering of these struggles in Atlanta challenges
conventional understandings of what is work and who is a worker.
It represents the best of the recent marriage of labor history and
cultural studies. It builds on feminist theory, which has expanded
the conception of labor to include housework, mother-work, and sex
work...Grounded in Atlanta's rise from Sherman's ashes, this is no
ordinary community study. It addresses a major theme in Southern
history: the contestation between freedom with Emancipation and
its violent restriction with disfranchisement and Jim Crow...To
restore the voices of the black masses is itself a form of hard
work. Hunter's genius is to read against the grain of police
reports and planter diaries as well as to mine newspapers to
recover stories sometimes only seen through shadows cast on white
society."
--Eileen Boris, The Nation
"Historian Tera W. Hunter looks at how
black working-class women defined and experienced freedom between
the Civil War and the World War I-era 'Great Migration' of blacks
northward, a period when they were excluded from electoral
politics as well as from most grass-roots union organizing. Hunter
shows that these women saw their work as a means to shore up their
self-ownership after slavery, rather than as an end in itself.
Black women negotiatied work conditions and, when they found these
unacceptable, they quit. The dramatic centerpiece of Hunter's book
is a threatened strike by black Atlanta washerwomen in the summer
of 1881...To 'Joy My Freedom is a worthwhile read, powerfully
evoking the chaos of the Civil War and the transition of black
women workers from slave to free and from rural to urban people.
It joins a growing canon that points to the development of
political consciousness among black working-class women."
--Dale Edwyna Smith, Washington
Post Book World
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"Tera
Hunter's book is a meticulously researched, cogently
argued analysis of the `dialectic of repression and
resistance' shaping the lives of African American women in
the postbellum South. Better still, it's a terrifically
told story--a tale of everyday women doing the radical
work of defining and demanding freedom for themselves and
their communities in a country largely hell-bent on
denying them their rights."
--Cynthia Dobbs, San
Francisco Examiner & Chronicle |
"Hunter's
achievement in bringing these black women's stories to life is
remarkable. Scouring newspaper accounts, personal diaries,
household records, government reports and political cartoons,
Hunter has reconstructed the myths and stereotypes about black
female workers in and around Atlanta. In the process, she sheds
light on a chapter of American history and the Southern labor
movement that has heretofore remained unexamined...To 'Joy
My Freedom is a brilliant reconstruction of New South
history...Analytical and objective as this work of history is,
[it] is also written with such passion that the stories of these
women and the events that shaped their lives--and American
history--reads like the best fiction. Hunter's work is a tour de
force, valuable and prophetic as America continues to struggle
with the issues of work, fairness, sex and race."
--Paula L. Woods, Atlanta
Journal/Constitution
"In
To 'Joy
My Freedom, Tera W.
Hunter charts the efforts of African-American women in Atlanta to
live fulfilling lives despite an all-pervasive racism, which was
most terrifying in the city's infamous race riot of 1906...One can
only applaud Hunter's efforts to recover the experience of her
subjects from obscurity."
--Times Literary Supplement
"Tera Hunter's
book is an exemplary effort to illuminate the particular history
of black women domestic workers in Atlanta. By painstakingly
pulling together disparate sources, she fashions a story of
resistance and backlash that illustrates how these women bravely
attempted to achieve true freedom in the face of attacks on their
femininity, the stigma of tuberculosis, and outright mob violence.
Her account skillfully integrates the oppressive nature of
dominant gender roles, the role of class in intraracial
subordination, and disease as stigma, although the reasons for the
attachment of this stigma particularly to black washerwomen
remains unclear. Overall, Hunter succeeds in showing the
complexities of a fifty-year struggle by black women workers, who,
in their words, fought 'to 'joy my freedom.'"
--Bayo Holsey, Transforming
Anthropology
"To 'Joy My
Freedom is a new departure in recent written history of
African American women. Here, working-class women take center
stage while black middle-class and elite woman are peripheral. For
those who fear tackling the history of women whose personal
records are few to nonexistent, Tera W. Hunter's book is at once
instructive on how to write such a history and an example of a
sophisticated blend of labor, social, and cultural history...Rich
in detail and told with compassion and understanding, To 'Joy
My Freedom fills in the gaps between contemporary histories of
slavery and middle-class female uplift reform. Hunter demonstrates
that professional skill, exhaustive research, and ingenious use of
sources can give voice to people who leave few personal records
and who do not show up in organizational minutes."
--Deborah Gray White, Journal
of American History
"Tera W. Hunter
has written a superb study of the lives and labors of some of the
African-American women who struggled through the violent upheaval
of emancipation and the crushing imposition of racial segregation
in the American South from the Civil War to the 1920s. Hunter's
sparkling prose, extensive reading of a wide range of texts, and
layered, complex and incisive analysis reveal the work of an
impressively humane, imaginative, and mature historian. Her acute
descriptions of local conditions and cogent insights into the
larger historical context stunningly illuminate the dynamics of
race, class, and gender as they played out on the frightening,
brutal terrain of southern segregation...Her text constantly
engages and re-engages the reader, helping us to imagine the lives
of dozens of individuals who walk through the pages of
history...This study is a triumph of research, astute analysis,
and engaging imagination that deserves to be widely read by
students of African-American, labor, and women's studies and of
American history."
--Michael Honey, American
Historical Review
"At the end of
the Civil War newly emancipated women moved to Atlanta to find
employment as household labourers and washerwomen. This is a study
of the workplace experiences and everyday culture of these black
working women in the period until the beginning of World War I.
Tracing the ways they constructed their own world of work, culture
and community organization, Professor Hunter argues that their
experiences and efforts were central to the African-American
struggle for freedom and justice. The implementation of Jim Crow
laws and segregation from the 1880s onward, however, spurred
growing numbers of black working women to migrate to the
North."
--International Review of
Social History
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"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."
--Library Journal |
"To 'Joy
My Freedom is a tour de force. Moving deftly between white
households and black communities, churches and blues clubs, city
hall and city streets, Tera Hunter brings black domestic workers
alive, body and soul, smashing all stereotypes along the way. By
placing black working class women at the center of her narrative,
she rewrites the history of the New South and the nation. Her
vibrant, complex, beautifully rendered portrait of black working
women's struggles at the dawn of the century will move you as
surely as it will alter the way we write history."
--Robin D. G. Kelley, New York
University
"By bringing to
life the experiences, aspirations, and struggles of the black
domestic workers of Atlanta, Tera Hunter opens a new window on the
study of emancipation and its aftermath and, in so doing,
tremendously enriches our understanding of Reconstruction and the
New South."
--Eric Foner, Columbia
University
"To 'Joy
My Freedom is a work of utmost originality and significance. Tera
Hunter brings the virtually invisible world of black working-class
women to life [and then] uses those lives as a vantage point from
which to reconsider the transition from slavery to freedom, the
nature of southern Progressivism, the Great Migration of blacks
out of the South during World War I, and the relationship and
tensions between work, play, and politics in the New South."
--Jacquelyn Dowd Hall,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"With great
breadth, sensitivity, and intellectual integrity, Tera Hunter
reorients southern history toward the urban working class. This
tour de force further liberates African-American history from the
need always to relate to whites. Bravo!"
--Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton
University http://www.history.cmu.edu/faculty/Tera_Hunter.html
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posted 22 June 2008 |
