Writing of Labor and Love: Gender and African American History’s Challenge to Present Day Assumptions and Misinterpretations

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About the Author

Tera W. Hunter is Professor of History and African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Her book on slavery and marriage in the 19th century is due out next year.

Notes

See Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984).

For a small sampling of these see, Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997).

See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

On slave law see Margaret Burnham, “An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law,” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 5 (July 1987): 187–225. Other studies of slave marriage: Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Rebecca J. Fraser, Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Frances Smith Foster, ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part : Marriage and the Making of African America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

The term is documented especially in military and Civil War pension records. See Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 41; Donald R. Shaffer, After Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 102; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 198–99.

Report from Mis s L[ucinda] Humphrey, Camp Fiske, Tennessee, August 20, 1863, in American Missionary 7 (October 1863), 235–36.

On the importance of this idea of the collective being a part of black intellectual thought in this era see: Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Catherine A. Fitch and Steven Ruggles, “Historical Trends in Marriage Formation.” In Ties that Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation, edited by Michelle Hindin, Arland Thornton, Elizabeth Thomson, Christine Bachrach, and Linda J. Waite (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000), 59–88.

I have commented on this here: “Putting an Antebellum Myth to Rest,” August 2, 2011, New York Times, p. A25.

This literature, from the left and the right, is too numerous to list. See, for example, Orlando Patterson, Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries (New York: Basic, Civitas, 1998); Kay S. Hymowitz, Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2006).

James H. Sweet, “Centering Families in Atlantic Histories,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70 (April 2013): 251–72.