To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

Published in 1997, Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War is a history of working-class African-American women’s lives in Atlanta, Georgia, from Emancipation to World War I. The text examines the interplay between the racial repression African-American women faced during this time and the resistance they enacted as they sought to exercise their freedom as laborers. The book is winner of several awards, including: the 1998 H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association; the 1997 Book of the Year Award, International Labor History Association; and the 1997 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, Association of Black Women Historians.

In the preface, Hunter discusses the challenges of writing working-class black women’s history, namely, the lack of primary sources focused on this group. In the prologue, Hunter explains that African-American women were largely confined to domestic work. They engaged in constant struggles to define themselves outside of the labor, while white employers constantly sought to impose an identity that defined African-American women solely as laborers.

In Chapter 1, Hunter documents the lives of working-class black women during the Civil War and in its immediate aftermath in Atlanta. Hunter observes that African-American women were already engaged in contests over their labor with white employers.