A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (review)

Abstract

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in Antebellum City. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2008. Pp. 212. Cloth, $55.00)Reviewed by Rita ReynoldsThe history of African American women has evolved over past 25 years at a relatively slow pace when compared with African American history in general. Deborah Gray White's Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in Plantation South, published in 1985 (New York), was one of first books to consider African American slave women as scholarly subjects in their own right. Jean Yellin Fagan's efforts to prove Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative Incidents in Life of a Slave Girl was fact and not abolitionist fiction validated Jacobs's work as historical document. Jacqueline Jones's Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family from Slavery to Present (New York, 2009) did much to unravel dynamics of race, class, and gender for laboring black women in nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In like manner Catherine Clinton reevaluated complexities of life for domestic southern slave women and for wealthy white women whose seemingly neverending needs they tended to in antebellum South.Erica Armstrong Dunbar explores how African American women in Philadelphia experienced transformation from slaves to free women of color beginning in colonial period to Civil War. Dunbar builds on solid historical scholarship on Philadelphia's free people of color by Julie Winch and Gary Nash, to name just two. But what makes this work different is its focus on what Dunbar calls regular slave and free black women of period (2).Dunbar's main argument is that, as freedom came in degrees to slave women who were last to truly experience benefits of freedom, 19th century Philadelphia served as a rehearsal for emancipation in post-Civil War era across nation (3). By using black women's friendship albums, church records, labor contracts, and personal correspondences, Dunbar is able to tell story of both wealthy literate and impoverished illiterate black women in a logical, well-documented, and convincingly argued manner.Dunbar's relatively short volume does a great deal to reconstruct gendered world in which antebellum urban black women struggled. She begins with economic and political importance of slavery in colonial Pennsylvania and argues that while Pennsylvania was considered the best poor man's country, Quakers, regardless of their religious beliefs, relied on slave labor. When Peculiar Institution came to an end during early national period Africans and African Americans moved toward a new kind of unfree labor - indentured servitude. Black women suffered greatest hardship because those born before March 1, 1780, would remain enslaved for life, and their children born after that date would remain in bondage for not more than 28 years. …