The Gendering of Reconstruction: Contests over the Private and Public in North Carolina

In recent years a stunning new collection of works on nineteenth-century southern history has turned to analyses of gender, in the process rewriting the political, social, and cultural history of the antebellum and Reconstruction South. Laura Edwards’ important and deeply researched new study is a compelling addition to such works as Stephanie McCurry’s Masters of Small Households, Victoria Bynum’s Unruly Women, Drew Gilpin Faust’s Mothers of Invention, LeeAnn Whites’ The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender, Peter Bardaglio’s Reconstructing the Household, Leslie Schwalm’s A Hard Fight for We, and Glenda Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow. Like these studies, Gendered Strife and Confusion finds that contests over ideas of manhood and womanhood, dependence and independence, and public and private were at the center rather than the periphery of southern politics and culture. Indeed, a major theme of Edwards’ work is that “the stuff of private life was inherently political” for African Americans, common whites, and elite whites during Reconstruction in North Carolina (p. 18). As she argues, the politics of public life were not separate from but instead were deeply imbedded in and shaped by the politics of private life.

A local study that takes the tobacco-based economy and culture of Granville County, North Carolina as its purview, Gendered Strife and Confusion relies on a perceptive analysis of court cases to find that far from domestic matters having been separate from the era’s “major political debates,” they often acted to shape “more traditionally defined political demands.” Thus “isolating certain issues in the private sphere was a political move that effectively kept certain people on the margins of power.” Conversely, when African Americans and common whites made public claim to private rights they were able to claim “not just political personas for themselves but also the right to define the substance of public debate” (p. 18).

In the wake of the war, for instance, marriage was an institution that was used to legitimize both the obligations and the rights of African Americans. On the one hand, white politicians and legislators both advocated and mandated African-American marriage, acting on fears that children born of slave unions might have to be cared for by the state unless freedpeople were legally required to care for their children. Pragmatic rather than moral concerns underlay a policy that completely ignored the state’s prior “complicity in denying legal marriages to slaves,” not to mention many freedpeople’s own desire to marry (p. 34).

Yet if the state emphasized freedpeople’s obligations with this policy, freedpeople themselves sometimes successfully used marriage to claim rights, including both greater autonomy and freedom from white control. Because marriage legitimized freedmen as heads of households, African-American men were occasionally able to claim the rights attached to this status—such as the right to control their own children rather than having them apprenticed out to work without their say. Marriage, as Edwards points out, “carried the potential to increase freedpeople’s authority” (p. 37). In short, though the boundaries between public and private were heavily policed throughout Reconstruction, the very act of policing these boundaries brought into public view aspects of private life that African Americans in particular could use to claim a variety of rights. Though Edwards does not cite Foucault, there is a Foucauldian aspect to this running argument concerning the dynamics of power throughout her text.

But as Edwards points out, there were limitations to the power African Americans could gain through use of the law. Family law, after all, was “part of a patriarchal framework that had justified the subordination of marginalized men as well as women and could still be mobilized to serve the same ends” (p. 64). Because the law was structured around ideas of independence and dependence, with women and children as the dependents upon whom men’s independence fundamentally rested, those who sought...