In pursuit of autonomous womanhood: nineteenth-century black motherhood in the U.S. North

Abstract

ABSTRACTAfrican Americans who resided in the antebellum North were subjected to forms of disenfranchisement that informed their political activism. These experiences were especially pronounced for black women whose identities existed at the intersections of race and gender, and black children who in some cases remained enslaved and indentured beyond their parents. The development of discourse on Northern black motherhood, produced in nineteenth-century black print culture and black women’s activism, countered indeterminate conditions of Northern freedom by promoting the empowering potential of black maternal authority.