46 pages • 1 hour read
Tera W. HunterTo ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Tera W. Hunter
Tera W. Hunter, the author of To ‘Joy My Freedom, is a professor of history at Princeton University. Her work, which focuses on slavery, women, gender, and labor, contributes to Southern history and the history of the working class. As a historian addressing long-neglected subjects in her field, Hunter must seek out additional resources to augment the limited information found in traditional primary sources. She looks at population data, household records, and arrest records to provide a more accurate portrait of the history of women, African Americans, and the working-class.
Hunter’s narrative focuses on an exploration of history “from below,” as opposed to focusing on great men (and to a lesser extent, white women) who dominated history up until the last few decades. For example, Hunter’s discussion of Lugenia Burns Hope, an African-American woman central to the founding of the Neighborhood Union, demonstrates the importance of affluent African-American women to the country’s settlement house movement. Hunter’s inclusion of African-American women who were ex-slaves and/or members of the working class is an important feature of her work. Even the book’s title signals her intent to give voice to the black experience: The title comes from a statement made by ex-slave Julie Tillory, who came to Atlanta against all odds to experience the benefits of being free at last.
Working-Class African-American Women
Working-class African-American women dominate Hunter’s work. Her focus counteracts the fact that whites and affluent African Americans have largely shaped the narrative about working-class black women—and viewed these women as objects to be reformed, attempting to control their bodies or extract profit from them. The idea of racial uplift underlies the desire to bring working-class African Americans up to a standard of black respectability that would not embarrass middle-class or affluent African Americans in front of whites.
The working-class black women in Hunter’s work are anything but passive, however. These women make strategic decisions about work in order to meet the needs of their communities and families. Creative and enterprising, they were the backbone of efforts to organize politically, and they were vocal and persistent voices of resistance to white supremacy and oppression. Many of the direct quotes in Hunter’s work are from individual and collective utterances of working-class black women. The voice of the black, working-class woman is essential to this history.
White Employers
Hunter presents the central struggle in her work as one between working-class black women and their white employers. White employers in Atlanta engaged in a long struggle to assert control over African-American women and their labor. Their efforts to dominate took many forms, shaped by the legal and economic landscape. White employers in this work are frequently women with an inherent belief in their own superiority due to white supremacist ideas. White employers were not averse to behaving in ways that were violent or even illegal in order to extract cheap labor from their domestic workers.
With the end of slavery, white employers frequently experienced frustration as their black domestic workers refused to behave in ways that acknowledged this belief in white superiority. Another important aspect of white employers’ identity, as described by Hunter, was their increasing ambivalence about close contact with black domestic workers, especially as the legal landscape changed to one of almost total racial segregation. While white employers felt ambivalence about their black domestic workers, they relied on them, sometimes from childhood since child-nurses were frequently African American.
The South
Hunter explores several aspects of the South’s regional identity, such that it becomes a character in the narrative. In the aftermath of the war, the South was devastated. Atlanta is one of several cities that General Sherman burned during his military campaign. After the war, however, Southern cities like Atlanta were primed for economic recovery because they had already established themselves as distribution and transportation hubs. Atlanta rapidly rebuilt its industry and experienced a population boom that fueled its recovery after the war, attracting working-class people of all races and investment by business interests.
Despite the publicity surrounding the New South, the region gained a reputation as sleepy, backwards, and lazy when compared to the rest of the nation over the decades following the Civil War to the 20th century. Much of the South was still rural, and plagued by high rates of disease, poverty, and illiteracy despite the attempts of boosters to tout the benefits of doing business in the New South.
The other important aspect of the identity of the South was its so-called “Negro problem.” Despite the abolition of slavery, the region and the nation as a whole never quite got around to integrating African Americans into society as a whole. While the arrival of the New South seemed to find a place for African Americans as subservient laborers, the truth was that African Americans became second-class citizens in the South, and the nation followed suit.
