A Fragile Freedom

Abstract

This book describes the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. It investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of free persons in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston. Free of the many burdens of poverty, a handful of African American women in Philadelphia had the opportunity to engage in political and social activism, the most important of which was the antislavery movement, and would enter an arena of politics inhabited by white men and women and contribute to the definition of abolition in its formative moments. Even though their own freedom, although precarious, had been secured shortly after the American Revolution, they worked to secure the freedom of all men and women of African descent. These elite women were unusual. Without the benefits of family wealth and reputation, the majority of African American women in Philadelphia gained freedom and its advantages through their own long and arduous work. As domestics, washerwomen, seamstresses, and fruit hucksters, they experienced emancipation in the later years of their lives, spending much of their energy securing the freedom of their children, their own sweet buds of promise.