Book Review

Canada and the United States

This pathbreaking study of emancipation in the lowcountry South Carolina rice districts, with its rare focus on slave women, was the worthy recipient of the Willie Lee Rose prize for 1998. Leslie A. Schwalm's analysis stresses slave women's central roles in establishing rice culture, pioneering resistance techniques, and reshaping labor and freed communities in the early Reconstruction era. This focus on women's labor, coupled with labor's ramifications for slave families and communities, defines the book's unique conception. Schwalm effectively demonstrates the centrality of community for slave women. Significantly, she adds that hers is a history of slave and freedwollien's encounters with the state. Her argument that slave women's interwoven labor and familial experiences are crucial to a full understanding of emancipation is persuasive, nuanced, and well-documented. This book—and the title is apt—is a signal contribution to the fields of gender, race, and labor in the nineteenth century.

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Schwalm is at particular pains to broaden the history of slave women beyond the bounds of family where, she argues, they have languished too long. Work and family were equally important material conditions for the content of slave women's lives, and the resistance of the former promoted the structures of the latter, Slave women worked, and in lowcountry South Carolina they formed the backbone of the labor force in the rice fields. Building on Peter Woods's landmark Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974), Schwalm shows that women, utilizing skills they wielded in Senegambia, were responsible for the rice revolution in the late eighteenth-century lowcountry. Certainly women displayed a great respect for family life, whose chief significance lay in its extended structure, in turn forming the foundation for women's emphasis on community strength, the arena where they defined freedom. Indeed, "extended community" might best capture Schwalm's analysis of slave women's most important social terrain. Within that network, West African social and economic influences were palpable.

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