Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South by Brandi Clay Brimmer (review)

Brandi Clay Brimmer's Claiming Union Widowhood: Race, Respectability, and Poverty in the Post-Emancipation South joins works by Thavolia Glymph and Tera W. Hunter in its exploration of the lives of Black women, the majority of them recently enslaved, in the last third of the nineteenth century. Brimmer's book focuses on Black widows of Union army soldiers and their attempts, successful and otherwise, to access government pensions after their husbands' deaths. In giving testimony and appealing denials, Black women organized within community networks and often mastered the intricacies of the pension system in their quest to provide for themselves and their children. Black women asserted themselves as citizens and left written evidence of the workings of the Black community in the decades after emancipation.

Brimmer's study focuses on eastern North Carolina and the women, families, agents, lawyers, and pension examiners who lived and worked there. Although the geographic focus is narrow, the themes that Brimmer identifies speak to broad trends and theories that underpin African American women's history. For example, although the specifics of laws governing eligibility for pension support changed a few times, one constant restriction had to do with definitions of marriage and widow. For women who "married" while enslaved and never had their marriages certified under law, this omission could derail efforts to receive pension funds. In their attempts to ferret out the timelines and validity of Black marriages, agents and examiners had to rely on the testimony of Black witnesses as to the nature of Black relationships. These words, collected in the pension files, provide early evidence of government agents gathering and relying on Black community knowledge.

Widows who cohabited with men, remarried, or bore children more than nine months after their husbands' deaths were judged ineligible for support. In a section students of Black women's history will find drearily familiar, Brimmer shows how U.S. Pension Bureau examiners questioned Black women aggressively about their sexual lives and habits, relying on assumptions about gender, race, and sexuality that flourished both in slavery and in freedom. Acting as citizens for the first time, Black women resisted such characterizations and prying assumptions, often insisting on keeping their private lives private. Brimmer also shows how neighbors and estranged family members could weaponize testimonials to government examiners in their conflicts with Black widows.

While the book's argument concerns the lives and struggles of these women as widows, the pension files also provide glimpses into the lives of women who spent years as caretakers of elderly Black husbands, many of them still suffering from wounds and diseases contracted during the Civil War. Brimmer's labor in this rich archive should be commended. A few comments on the book's design and organization: The cover of the book and the frontispiece are lovely and evoke the many pension files that Brimmer has examined and the words of the nineteenth-century actors who provided the platform for her argument. The "cast of characters" at the beginning of the book is quite useful, helping readers keep track of the widows, examiners, claim agents, and politicians who people the pages. The arrangement of the notes and bibliography, however, is cumbersome. A reader wanting to drill down into the secondary literature must first read the endnote and then flip to the bibliography for the full citation. (Why? Why?) This layout was surely not the author's decision, but I would like to discourage the editors at Duke University Press from continuing this practice in the future.

This book is a valuable addition to African American and legal historiography. It would teach well in courses on women's history, labor history classes, and any course concerning emancipation.