In this Book
- Finding Charity's Folk: Enslaved and Free Black Women in Maryland
- Book
- 2015
- Published by: University of Georgia Press
- Series: Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900
summary
Finding Charity’s Folk highlights the experiences of enslaved Maryland women who negotiated for their own freedom, many of whom have been largely lost to historical records. Based on more than fifteen hundred manumission records and numerous manuscript documents from a diversity of archives, Jessica Millward skillfully brings together African American social and gender history to provide a new means of using biography as a historical genre.Millward opens with a striking discussion about how researching the life of a single enslaved woman, Charity Folks, transforms our understanding of slavery and freedom in Revolutionary America. For African American women such as Folks, freedom, like enslavement, was tied to a bondwoman’s reproductive capacities. Their offspring were used to perpetuate the slave economy. Finding loopholes in the law meant that enslaved women could give birth to and raise free children. For Millward, Folks demonstrates the fluidity of the boundaries between slavery and freedom, which was due largely to the gendered space occupied by enslaved women. The gendering of freedom influenced notions of liberty, equality, and race in what became the new nation and had profound implications for African American women’s future interactions with the state.Published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Program in African American History
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xi-xvi
- Bibliography
- pp. 95-118
- Other Works in the Series
- pp. 131-132
- Image Plates
- pp. 133-136
Additional Information
ISBN
9780820348797
Related ISBN(s)
9780820331089
MARC Record
OCLC
933338187
Pages
152
Launched on MUSE
2016-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No