A Hard Fight for We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina

by Leslie A. Schwalm

Book Overview

African-American women fought for their freedom with courage and vigor during and after the Civil War. Leslie Schwalm explores the vital roles of enslaved and formerly enslaved women on the rice plantations of lowcountry South Carolina, both in antebellum plantation life and in the wartime collapse of slavery. From there, she chronicles their efforts as freedwomen to recover from the impact of the war while redefining their lives and labor.

Freedwomen...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0252066308
• ISBN13: 9780252066306
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Length: 424 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Enslaved African American Women

Leslie A. Schwalm's text revolves around enslaved African American women on South Carolina low country rice plantations. Her focus is their transition from slavery to freedom, their push to hasten the demise of slavery, their struggle to achieve and maintain autonomy over their labor, their resistance, and their plight for dignity while they battled for respect in their own households. Schwalm contends that enslaved African American women slowed plantation production and took advantage of every opportunity presented by the Civil War to secure their freedom. Enslaved African American women were expected to be productive field laborers', in fact, they lay at the very heart of South Carolina low country rice plantation labor. With the Civil War approaching, rice agriculture in the South Carolina low country depended primarily on the hands and backs of slave women. Field labor was not the only responsibility these slave women had to keep in mind, they also had to perform motherly and household duties. Domestic production and field labor, Schwalm contends, were central to a slave women's experience. The Civil War presented enslaved African American women with opportunitites to ease the grips of slavery while they contested the terrible conditions on South Carolina low country plantations. This form of resistance eventually became more aggressive. In the early months of freedom, freed women attacked overseers, looted planters houses, destroyed planters property, and draped themselves and their children in their former masters clothing as a sign of protest and changing times. With their freedom seemingly secure, former slave women turned their attention to the control of their labor. They demanded the ability to live and work as they saw fit and seperate from white supervision. They had their own concepts of freedom and were determined to labor as free people and not as slaves. The slave womens family depended upon her work as much as the rice field did. The task system of labor afforded slave! women the opportunity to devote daylight hours to domestic production. This was crucial to family development. Slave women used their "after task time" to hire themselves out, grow their own crop, fish, and make family utensils. Slaves viewed production, independent from plantation production, as a way to elevate their standard of living and exercise control over their daily life. Slave women applied these same principles in a free labor work force after emancipation. The military experience had a dramatic impact on the relationships between freedmen and women. People believed that the military experience equated to manhood. Proving their manhood through military experience was a goal for black soldiers, their advocates and and white officers. This sentiment carried over to post was relationships between free black men and women. Leslie A. Schwalm's " A Hard Fight For We" is critical for painting a more complete picture of rice plantation labor i