Book Review

In Freedom's Women, Noralee Frankel provides a case study of black women's efforts to preserve their sense of family during the disruptions of war and the first five years of Reconstruction. Frankel argues that African American families became "male-headed" but not patriarchal. She chronicles the differing points of view separating black family members, who understood themselves to have married and created stable if vulnerable families even during slavery, from slaveholders and Union officials, who insisted that those bonds had no legitimacy.

1

Influenced by assumptions about black women's uncontrolled sexuality and their primary value as laborers for whites, the military simultaneously demanded official marriages even as they separated family members so that men could serve as soldiers while women and children worked in the (northern-controlled) fields. After the war ended, whites continued to interfere with black families in ways centered around the desire to control their labor; African Americans were prevented from withdrawing women's and children's labor from the fields or choosing to have women's primary work responsibilities be caring for their own families.

. . .