| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. By Erica Armstrong Dunbar. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. xvi, 196 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-300-12591-7.)
The study of the lives of free black women in Philadelphia have long focused on the women of the famous Forten family—Charlotte, Harriet, Margaretta, Mary, and Sarah Louise—members of the tiny elite class of free blacks who left behind written documents recording their thoughts and their work for abolition. Getting at non-elite free black women's history to flesh out this view is fraught with challenges. In A Fragile Freedom, however, Erica Armstrong Dunbar has moved beyond elites to illuminate the roles ordinary free black women assumed as they moved from slavery to servitude to freedom in Philadelphia.	1
After surveying the early years of slavery in colonial and revolutionary Pennsylvania, Dunbar describes how African American women moved out of slavery into indentured servitude, as white indentured servitude disappeared after the Revolution. The Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 freed black women, but most were still restricted by indentures to their former owners, an arrangement almost as limiting as enslavement. Black women were usually bound to domestic service for as long as the law allowed, but many took advantage of their condition to learn domestic skills that would help them survive once their indenture ended.	. . .

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