Gender and the Jubilee

In Gender and the Jubilee Sharon Romeo places African American women at the center of the wartime struggle for freedom and citizenship in Missouri. By turning to Union officers and military courts for justice, enslaved women asserted a national citizenship at odds with their legal status in the state. Romeo also shows how their actions influenced the Reconstruction policies of the federal government, particularly the Freedmen's Bureau, after 1865. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved and free black women in Missouri shared a history of legal activism. In the decades before the war, hundreds of African Americans sued for their freedom. Romeo points out that Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), the most famous of these lawsuits, was likely instigated by Dred Scott's wife. The state required free black people to be “licensed” (as proof of their freedom), and both women and men challenged that law. As Romeo demonstrates, black Missourians were knowledgeable and experienced litigants

African american · Black women · Citizenship · Economic Justice · Ethnology · Government (linguistics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · State (computer science · Wife · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• War Stuff

  Joan E Cashin•War Stuff•2018

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