Southern Resistance and Northern Defiance: African American Women’s Quest for Freedom and Political Agency

Abstract

In Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household and Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South, Thavolia Glymph and Hannah Rosen not only illustrate the gruesome violence inflicted onto black women’s bodies, but these historians also show the ways that black women resisted such violence and degradation, re-configuring the definition of citizenship and respectable womanhood. Whereas the prevailing ideology of nineteenth-century conceptions of blackness and womanhood sought to remove, often forcibly, black women from their claim to respectability, virtue, autonomy, and voice, Glymph and Rosen highlight the immense struggles yet tenacious persistence of black women in the American South who imagined an identity for themselves outside of the racist and sexist ideology under which they lived and laboured. When we place Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s book A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City in conversation with Glymph’s and Rosen’s texts, we observe a more nuanced approach to the study of African American women’s experience with and transgression from nineteenth-century American racial conventions. Dunbar charts the social mobility and individual agency of African American women in Philadelphia during the decades preceding the Civil War.