Mary Farmer‐Kaiser . Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation . (Reconstructing America.) New York: Fordham University Press. 2010. Pp. xiv, 275. Cloth $80.00, paper $26.00.

Abstract

Earlier generations of scholarship on the Freedmen's Bureau underscored the agency's disappointing record in protecting freedpeople. Mary Farmer-Kaiser's more nuanced look restores the Bureau's achievements in social uplift while acknowledging that, perhaps inexorably, many policies had abysmal consequences. For all its flaws, ultimately the Bureau was freedpeople's only recourse, and black women called upon its resources with mixed results. Highlighting Bureau policy and the men who implemented it at the local level—the assistant and subassistant commissioners, or field agents—she trains a gendered lens on the Bureau's relationship with freedwomen, showing how women sometimes ably exploited the Victorian gender norms that agents pressed on them, even while suffering devastating “gendered blows” at the Bureau's hands (p. 34). Agents inflexibly regarded the contract as the model for all social relations—free labor as well as marriage. The complex necessity of simultaneously instilling free labor and the cult of domesticity emerged from that rigidity. Imposing one without the other was inconceivable, yet in the context of freedwomen's lives, agents frequently encountered contradictions that compromised their gendered definition of freedom and their ability to impose it.