Although the subtitle suggests a work of larger scope, this is a
modest social history that focuses on black women in Atlanta from
the 1860s through WW I. According to Hunter (History/Carnegie
Mellon Univ.), black women in post-Civil War Atlanta were primarily
domestic servants - laundresses, cooks, nannies, and maids - while
the more lucrative and prestigious blue-collar women's jobs were
reserved for white women. These jobs were guarded jealously: In
1897, when 20 black women were hired to fold bags at the Fulton Bag
and Cotton Mill, the 200 white women who worked in the folding
department walked off the job in protest. Despite great
difficulties, many black women were, Hunter notes, determined to
see their families do better. One northern journalist noted this:
"I visited the mill neighborhood of Atlanta to see how the poorer
classes of white people lived. I found one very comfortable home
occupied by a family of mill employees. They hired a Negro woman to
cook for them, and while they sent their children to the mill to
work, the cook sent her children to school!" In spite of the
enormous odds, black women made some progress toward fairer working
and living conditions. One way they did this was by organizing: In
1881, striking black laundresses even managed to coerce the small
percentage of white laundresses to join them - an unusual display
of interracial cooperation. Black women cooks also made more of
their paltry wages by "pan-toting," or taking home kitchen
leftovers from their white employers, and laundresses would often
borrow the clothing they washed for special occasions. Eventually,
though, many black women found these and other measures too meager,
and by 1920 hundreds of thousands had moved North in search of
equality. A capsule look at the travails and triumphs of black
women after emancipation, too narrow in focus to appeal to general
readers. (Kirkus Reviews)
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women
workers made their way to Atlanta-the economic hub of the newly
emerging urban and industrial south-in order to build an
independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In
an original and dramatic work of scholarship, Tera Hunter traces
their lives in the postbellum era and reveals the centrality of
their labors to the African-American struggle for freedom and
justice. Household laborers and washerwomen were constrained by
their employers' domestic worlds but constructed their own world of
work, play, negotiation, resistance, and community organization.
Hunter follows African-American working women from their newfound
optimism and hope at the end of the Civil War to their struggles as
free domestic laborers in the homes of their former masters. We
witness their drive as they build neighborhoods and networks and
their energy as they enjoy leisure hours in dance halls and clubs.
We learn of their militance and the way they resisted efforts to
keep them economically depressed and medically victimized. Finally,
we understand the despair and defeat provoked by Jim Crow laws and
segregation and how they spurred large numbers of black laboring
women to migrate north. Hunter weaves a rich and diverse tapestry
of the culture and experience of black women workers in the
post-Civil War south. Through anecdote and data, analysis and
interpretation, she manages to penetrate African-American life and
labor and to reveal the centrality of women at the inception-and at
the heart-of the new south.
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