Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South

"This is one of my all-time favorite books. It’s a history of enslaved women’s efforts to escape some of the harsher and more violent moments of their enslavement. It traces enslaved women’s lives in the deep South from the antebellum period through the Civil War. Stephanie Camp looks at the different ways they resisted violence and dehumanization. They resisted physically by escaping. And sometimes they resisted by turning inward and drawing on their personal strength and dignity. For example, she writes about how enslaved women used their creativity to adorn the basic, bare clothing they were given and add adornments, scraps fashioned into beautiful decorations. These are women who saw themselves as women with worth, individuality and attributes that they wanted to showcase. She directs the reader to think about enslaved women as they thought about themselves. She shows how enslaved women’s sense of self enabled them to resist the violent dehumanization of slavery. Absolutely. All of the books that I picked for this list focus on enslaved people’s actions to gain freedom and to make freedom meaningful. In some ways, freedom is an empty term which gains meaning through laws and customs, but also through individual free people’s ideas, beliefs and behavior."