In early 1864, a visitor to a Louisiana plantation rang the bell at the door. When no one answered, the visitor rang again, politely but a bit more insistently. The white mistress called out in an exasperated voice for the Black woman to answer the door. “Answering bells is played out,” the Black woman shot back and continued with her work. I first read this encounter in Tera Hunter’s To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (1997). Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction, a collection of essays edited by Karen Cook Bell, owes a great deal to Hunter’s seminal work, but it generously pays back that debt with nine essays that expand our understanding of Black women’s agency, resilience, and labor in the Civil War-era South.

The story of the unnamed Black woman fed up with answering bells highlights the complexities of Black women’s lives and labors in the period. It is unclear if she was an enslaved woman emboldened by the disruptions of war to define the limits of her labor, or if she was a freed or self-emancipated woman taking advantage of those same disruptions to demand wages for her service. The essays in Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom offer several case studies of the ways Black women across the South actively pursued and shaped their own visions of freedom. Through their labor, legal battles, and confrontations with violence, they fought their own wars in diverse spaces: from kitchens, fields, and Freedmen’s Bureau courts to military tribunals and schoolhouses. Describing these women’s experiences in martial terms is apt, as they were engaged in an ongoing, unfinished struggle. Featuring scholarship from both established and emerging scholars, this collection is a valuable teaching text for college and even high school Advanced Placement U.S. History classrooms. It challenges staid Civil War and Reconstruction narratives by offering diverse, intersectional perspectives that illuminate this pivotal period in history.

Cook Bell organizes the nine essays, some previously published, into three sections. Part I, “Emancipation and Black Women’s Labor,” examines how formerly enslaved women navigated the transition to freedom, focusing on their strategies for economic survival, familial support, and negotiating gender roles. Part II, “War, Gender Violence, and the Courts,” explores the intersection of gender, violence, and legal struggles, highlighting how Black women confronted racial and sexual violence while asserting their rights and defining their freedom. Part III, “Emancipation, the Black Family, and Education,” explores how the sinews of Black community life were strengthened and stretched. The work’s themes follow paths forged by such scholars as Tera Hunter, Stephanie Camp, Jacqueline Jones, and Deborah Gray White, as well as a recent generation of historians parsing continuities between pre- and post-emancipation periods. The collection offers fresh perspectives on essential historical questions, such as embodied and other forms of resistance, free labor and racial capitalism, citizenship, women’s political culture, private and public violence, and complex meanings of family and community. Collected in a short, readable volume, Southern Black Women and Their Struggle for Freedom challenges, with every page, conventional understandings of the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Part I, Katherine Chilton’s essay, “‘The proceeds of my own labor’: Black Working Women in the District of Columbia during the Civil War,” explores how women in Washington, D.C. leveraged strong positions in the urban economy to support their families and capitalize on their roles within the household. In a city swelling with free Blacks, “first freed,” and self-emancipated living side by side, a number of Black women turned to “keeping house” to manage the challenges of the wartime and postwar economy: “The urban labor market could therefore empower Black women to claim equal respect and responsibilities as household providers” (27). Maintaining boarders allowed them to avoid live-in domestic labor arrangements and wage labor outside the home. It also empowered them to take other paid work on their own terms. Arlisha R. Norwood’s essay, “‘Please attend to it for me’: Single Black Women in Civil War and Reconstruction Era Virginia,” examines the experiences of economically vulnerable single Black women who were unmarried, divorced, widowed, abandoned, or separated. Dogged by charges of vagrancy and prostitution, they faced down suspicions from anxious army officials concerned about the presence of single women behind the lines. Single women were vulnerable to physical and sexual violence from Union soldiers, as well as bureaucratic manipulation by army and aid officials who withheld crucial aid and rations. Despite facing significant challenges, these women asserted their needs, collaborated to avoid destitution, and influenced federal and local agencies. Felicia Jamison’s essay, “‘I had time for myself’: Enslaved Women, Labor, and the Politics of Acquisition during the Civil War,” explores how Black women in Liberty County, Georgia, used their limited personal time to acquire property and secure their family’s future, even as Union soldiers commandeered essential goods. Black women demanded recognition of their “politics of acquisition.” They used property acquired in various ways to enhance their lives and freedom, including taking and giving personal pleasure from the things they owned, strategically navigating working conditions, creating economic opportunities, safeguarding the financial security of future generations, and petitioning the Southern Claims Commission to recover losses.

In Part II, Cook Bell’s essay, “Black Women, War, and Freedom in Southern Louisiana and Low Country Georgia,” focuses on the diverse experiences of enslaved women who used Union occupation to engage in “oppositional politics aimed at breaking racially exclusionary practices” (65). They demanded fair compensation for their labor, bending the exploitative contract labor system to their own ends as best they could, accessing abandoned lands in creative ways, and creating new social and political spaces to claim their freedom. Although they faced systematic obstacles, they persisted and laid the foundation for independence and self-determination in the postwar period and beyond. Crystal N. Feimster’s essay, “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” considers Black women at war – not just figuratively but also literally. In December 1863, Black laundresses armed themselves. Joined by United States Colored Troops (USCT) soldiers, they fought back against the racial and sexual violence they faced while working at the Union Fort Jackson in Louisiana. Besides armed resistance, they used newly available military tribunals to challenge racist and sexist assumptions and seek justice for their violations, but military officials ultimately acquitted most of the accused officers and soldiers. Kaisha Etsy’s essay, “‘I told him to let me alone, that he hurt me’: Black Women and Girls and the Battle over Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory,” highlights the deeply contested nature of Black women’s pursuit of sexual freedom and protection. Presumptions abounded that Black women’s and girls’ labor included sexual availability. Refugees and freedwomen used new legal recognitions gained through the Emancipation Proclamation and Lieber Code of 1863, which “acknowledged Black women as victims of sexual violence for the first time in US history” (101). They challenged racist and sexist structures by asserting their right to refuse unwanted sexual advances. Girls especially endured the dehumanizing violence of “adultification”: “perpetrators either approached them as mature women or later attempted to justify their attacks with arguments that Black girls were actually women who consented to illicit sex” (109). Etsy underscores how women’s and girls’ fight for sexual sovereignty laid the groundwork for later movements.

In Part III, Kelly Houston Jones’s essay, “Making Their Place on the Ragged Edge: USCT Women and Place in Little Rock, Arkansas,” examines the post-Civil War experiences of “wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers of men who served in US Colored Regiments” stationed around Little Rock (120). Women transformed the home and public spaces they inhabited into occupied territories where they asserted the legitimacy of their families and exerted “significant control over their domestic lives” (127). In the context of political placemaking, these women claimed new privileges and rootedness in the public sphere through their legal, fictive, and intimate associations with Black soldiers and veterans. Brandi C. Brimmer’s essay, “Black Women’s Lives and Labor in Post Emancipation North Carolina,” centers on the story of Fanny Whitney, an enslaved woman from Union-occupied eastern North Carolina, to explore the experiences of Black widows in post-Civil War America. Focusing on pension claims filed by Whitney and other southern Black women after 1866, when pension law recognized “slave marriage,” Black widows relied on community and kinship networks to claim their status as widows and the pensions owed them for their loved ones’ service. Within the context of an “unforgiving labor market,” they struggled daily to define their status and shape their freedom (153). Finally, Hilary Green’s essay, “‘Remaking Old Blue’: Emerson Normal and Addressing the Need for Public Schoolteachers in Mobile,” highlights the crucial role of Black women in advancing African American education through Emerson Normal School in postwar Mobile, Alabama. The school played a pivotal role in enabling formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants to become teachers, administrators, and community leaders. Emerson Normal expanded the educational partnerships between Black Mobilians and the American Missionary Association, creating a corps of teachers that formed an essential foundation for the new public school system. The influence of Emerson Normal graduates extended beyond the classroom. They actively participated in racial uplift organizations and contributed to the ongoing struggle for public education and racial equality in Mobile.

This collection of essays deepens our understanding of Black women’s lives, labors, and the complex realities of making freedom real. In a world where answering other people’s bells had become unthinkable, their experiences reveal their crucial role in shaping concepts of freedom, welfare, citizenship, and womanhood during and after the Civil War, challenging traditional narratives and offering new perspectives on their enduring struggle for justice and autonomy.