To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War

"To ‘Joy My Freedom is one of my favorite books. It centers Black working class women in the city of Atlanta. A lot has changed since Tera Hunter’s book, but labor history is still primarily the history of white men; oftentimes women, especially women of color, are excluded or marginalized. Hunter centers Black women. She shows the kind of work that Black women were doing in Atlanta and how crucial it was to the economic growth of the city and the political landscape of the city. “ To ‘Joy My Freedom is one of my favorite books” Importantly, the book helps us understand the transition from slavery to freedom. When the Civil War ended, Black women needed to carve out a space for themselves and their families. They had to figure out how to live out their lives, their work lives, their family lives, their social lives and their political lives. This book shows that freedom was very fragile and contingent for these women. Reading this book crystalized my determination to become a historian focused on Black women. I was struck by Tera Hunter’s creativity, how she used the limited sources to offer such incredible insights into Black women’s lives and how she centered working class and working poor women in her work. That, to me, was truly inspirational. I wanted to do similar work. I decided to apply to the grad school where Tera worked after I read her book. She became my advisor at Princeton."

"This magnificent book blazed a path for many scholars. To ‘Joy My Freedom looks at a group of women who worked in white homes, cleaning and doing the laundry during the post-emancipation period; a group of Black women who were typically overlooked as laborers and as women. “People had cookouts and music and parades, showcasing Black artistic talent, community, creativity, culture and beauty” Tera Hunter shows how these women developed strategies to control their own lives and organize for fair wages. They insisted on taking laundry into their own homes, rather than working in the household of their white employers, which allowed them to take care of their own children, work collectively and protect themselves from abuses that black women who worked in white homes were often forced to endure. Further, she explains how Black women created opportunities for amusement with each other and opportunities to socialize with men. It’s tricky. On the one hand, post-emancipation Black women were still expected to work for wages, primarily in service to white employers, through agricultural or domestic labor, while white women of a certain class were expected to be dependent on their husbands. Black women were not fully recognized by white people as women because they were put into a class of laborers. To ‘Joy My Freedom looks at how these women redefined themselves as women and as workers. And how they made their freedom meaningful through self-assertion."