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  • Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation
  • Kenneth Wayne Howell
Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation. By Mary Farmer-Kaiser. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Pp. 292. Graph, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780823232116, $80.00 cloth; 9780823232123, $26 paper.)

In the last few decades, scholars have produced a voluminous body of literature on the Reconstruction era. These works have generally reshaped our understanding [End Page 89] of the social and political landscape of this critical period in American history. Only recently, however, have scholars studied gender during the Civil War and Reconstruction years, providing students of this era with a clearer understanding of how women, who were once relegated to the private sphere of domesticity, actually helped shape public life in profound ways. In this same tradition, Mary Farmer-Kaiser’s Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Politics in the Age of Emancipation advances our understanding of gender roles during Reconstruction by examining the relationship between African American women and the agents of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (commonly referred to as the Freedmen’s Bureau), a topic that has received little attention until now.

Farmer-Kaiser examines the gendered nature of four distinct areas of the bureau’s public policy: the bureau’s efforts to alleviate physical suffering of the freedpeople by providing federal material relief; the agency’s attempt to create and implement a free labor system and bring an end to vagrancy; the bureau’s defense of the parental rights of the freedpeople and to end the white South’s abusive apprentice system; and the bureau’s efforts to secure civil rights and equal justice for the former slaves. In each chapter of Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau, the author reveals the consequences of bureau policies at work. Despite the fact that most of the policies of the bureau were issued without regard to gender, the implementation of the agency’s policies at the local level was often different for freedwomen and freedmen. For example, recognition of freedwomen’s gender by bureau agents often provided certain protections that were not available to freedmen. This point was clearly evident in cases where bureau men ignored federal policy that aid should only be handed out to freedpeople who were physically unable to work. Instead, the agents expanded definitions of the deserving poor in a way that allowed them to administer relief to able-bodied freedwomen. Likewise, agents amended official bureau labor policies that required able-bodied freedpeople to enter contracts or face prosecution as vagrants. Instead of prosecuting freedwomen, the local agents refused to prosecute African American women who did not enter into labor contracts. However, such attitudes also worked against black women. Given that the bureau officials and agents were influenced by the gender standards of the nineteenth century, they often encouraged freedmen to control and contract the labor of family members, including their wives and daughters.

Although African American women were sometimes relegated to second-class citizenship, a fate shared with white women in both northern and southern states, the author reminds us that they were active participants in remaking Reconstruction society. They openly engaged in the battle to define and defend freedom and citizenship for African Americans on their own terms by continuously interacting with the bureau. Throughout the South, freedwomen turned to the Freedmen’s Bureau and demanded that local agents recognize them as women and that the federal government consider their needs. In turn, local agents often ignored the freedwomen’s race and instead focused on the fact that they were women. Therefore, black women in the South enjoyed privileges and protection that were unavailable to black men.

Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau is well researched and written. The author’s research is based primarily on the records of four southern states—Virginia, [End Page 90] Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana. As such, the broad conclusions reached in this work will need to be examined in other regions of the South. This, however, in no way diminishes the merits of the study. Mary Farmer-Kaiser...

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