A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-Century New York

2 “We Were Not as Particular inthe Old Days about GettingMarried as They Are Now”

“We Were Not as Particular in the Old Days about Getting Married as They Are Now” Women, the Family, and Household Composition Following the abolition of slavery in New York, blacks renegotiated their family situations and created stable units. Black women were resilient and worked hard to ensure the survival of the black family as well as the larger black community during a period of intensifying racial discrimination. As economic, social, and political forces continued to conspire against African Americans, black women adapted their families to mitigate the harm done by this increasing racial discrimination. Gender roles within the black community were not as rigidly defined as they were among whites in the middle class; indeed, they were very fluid. Black women outnumbered black men in both slavery and freedom and were a strong presence in the labor market and the black community. This created a greater de facto equality between black men and women. Women historically worked for wages and were therefore not completely dependent on their fathers and husbands. Also, because increasing discrimination relegated black men to the most physically taxing and lowest-paid occupations, disenfranchised them, and singled them out for violence, there was less of a power differential between black men and black women than there was between white men and white women. Black leaders wanted black men and women to 2 41 fight racism by adopting middle-class ideals of masculinity and femininity . For men, this involved supporting and heading a household; for women, it meant restricting their activities to the domestic sphere and becoming “the angel in the house.” But the ideal greatly diverged from reality.1 In spite of the directives from black leaders, black women were the most influential members of the black family. They relied on numerous strategies to provide family stability in a time of increasing challenges . Black women had autonomy in New York City, and nowhere is this independence seen more than in the role that black women played within their families. While the family was the central institution of African American life, black families were generally not structured in the patriarchal way that black leaders promoted. Rather, they took on a variety of forms not necessarily based on biology or law. Only a small minority of women married, most worked outside the home, and many relied on other women rather than men for financial and emotional support. And though many free black families in New York City had a nuclear structure , most black households did not contain solely a nuclear family. Historians of African American family structure have consistently defined family stability in terms of a nuclear structure, assuming that households with a nuclear core were far more stable than those headed by single women.2 A preoccupation with nuclear family structure has led scholars to overlook the important role that women played in alternative family forms and the bonds that women created within their households. Rather than asking how many families were nuclear, perhaps we would do better to ask how blacks created family stability. By broadening this discussion of family structure, we gain a more accurate picture of black family composition in New York City. My analysis of more than eleven thousand black households in the 1850, 1860, 1870, and 1880 United States Manuscript Census (USMC) demonstrates that African Americans had a variety of family forms and that black women were central in creating and maintaining families in all those forms. Determining the relationships of people living in the same household from the manuscript census can be a bit tricky. The 1850, 1860, and 1870 censuses did not explicitly note family relationships. Nevertheless, other information makes it possible to reliably decipher family relation42 | “We Were Not as Particular in the Old Days about Getting Married” ships in the majority of households. As David Hacker and Steven Ruggles have pointed out in their extensive analysis of census data, census takers, when writing down information about households, followed an arrangement that revealed family relationships even when these were not actually noted.3 In 1850, 1860, and 1870, census marshals followed a specific method of recording the names of each member in the household. According to the census instructions, “The names are to be written, beginning with the father and mother; or if either, or both, be dead, begin with some other ostensible head of the family; to be followed , as far as...