A Fragile Freedom

African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City

Bibliographic Data

ID19985248
AuthorsErica Armstrong Dunbar (corresponding author)
Year2008
Pages212
Publication date2008-04-01
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueFragile Freedom (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherYale University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.12987/yale/9780300125917.001.0001
OpenAlexW2798612589
Open LibraryOL10319558M
ISBN9780300125917
LanguageEN
Citations received8

This book describes the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic. It investigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of free persons in the decades leading up to the Civil War, and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston. Free of the many burdens of poverty, a handful of African American women in Philadelphia had the opportunity to engage in political and social activism, the most important of which was the antislavery movement, and would enter an arena of politics inhabited by white men and women and contribute to the definition of abolition in its formative moments. Even though their own freedom, although precarious, had been secured shortly after the American Revolution, they worked to secure the freedom of all men and women of African descent. These elite women were unusual. Without the benefits of family wealth and reputation, the majority of African American women in Philadelphia gained freedom and its advantages through their own long and arduous work. As domestics, washerwomen, seamstresses, and fruit hucksters, they experienced emancipation in the later years of their lives, spending much of their energy securing the freedom of their children, their own sweet buds of promise

African american · Elite · Emancipation · Ethnology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Poverty · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society · African American women · American studies · Antislavery movements · Black studies · Free african americans · History · History - Military · History: American · Philadelphia · race relations · Slavery · Slaves · Social conditions · Social Science · united states · United States - 19th Century · United States - General · United States Civil War · USA · War · Women · Women's Studies · Women's Studies - General

Tools

Open DOILibgen