| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. By Stephanie M. H. Camp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv, 206 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2872-6. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5534-0.)

Closer to Freedom is an important contribution to that often-impassioned debate over "accommodation versus resistance" in African American history. It is also representative of the work of a rising generation of researchers who were taught by the first group of scholars to focus on the historical experiences of black American women. The debate and the development of African American women's history are intertwined in interesting ways. Reacting against the conventional academic wisdom of the early twentieth century that portrayed slaves as accommodating to and even benefiting from the institution of slavery and empowered by the insights of the civil rights movement and notions of manhood derived from black nationalism, historians took a renewed interest in slave studies. One of their core concerns was the question of resistance. But analyzing resistance within the framework of notions of manhood, not surprisingly, slighted the experiences of women. Such a view motivated a generation of largely female scholars to reexamine the institution of slavery from the perspective of the female slave. They recovered overlooked data and reinterpreted the existing historical record with concepts garnered from feminist theories.

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