| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Nancy Bercaw. Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861–1875. (Southern Dissent Series.) Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 2003. Pp. xviii, 279. $55.00.
Nancy Bercaw's book provides a case study of the coming of emancipation to the Mississippi Delta. More ambitiously but less successfully, it argues that changes in the relationships of power in black and white households offer the key to understanding that momentous transformation.	1
The delta is a good choice for a case study, because, as Bercaw notes, planters there lost effective command over slaves well before the Union army took control of the region. Three chapters on the war years trace the disintegration of the plantation household. Many black men ran off to join the Union army; most black women remained on the plantations, but, "building on fluid household structures" (p. 39), sought to redefine work and production around the goal of independence. Planter-class men lost the power over others that underlay their sense of masculinity; stripped of their mastery, many descended into "depression, vengeance, and mythmaking" (p. 78). Planter-class women, whose identity and authority rested "on their ability to maintain relationships" in the household, were left "adrift" (p. 53).	. . .

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