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1 ‘‘that the freed-women . . . may rise to the dignity and glory of true womanhood’’ The Men, Purpose, and Gendered Freedom of the Freedmen’s Bureau There is no being on earth for whom I have higher regard than a true woman; and if there is one thing I desire above another, it is, that the freed-women of this country, so long degraded and made merchandise of, may rise to the dignity and glory of true womanhood. A s part of a series of lectures entitled Plain Counsels for Freedmen, Brevet Major General Clinton Fisk, a veteran of the Civil War’s western theater and the first assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau to command operations in Kentucky and Tennessee, imparted these words and ‘‘a few additional suggestions’’ to former slave women as they embarked on their journey as freedwomen. Offering both freedmen and women ‘‘a hint or two’’ about race relations, work and free labor, marriage, home life, and religion, Fisk’s Plain Counsels was part of a broader narrative intent on defining for former slaves the most important rights, responsibilities, and values of freedom. To African American women, this bureau policy maker readily asserted: ‘‘You have serious and important work to do, and you should prepare yourselves for it, and devote yourselves to it.’’1 Assistant Commissioner Fisk, an abolitionist from New York and a devout Methodist, wanted freedwomen to discover and hold fast to the ideals of true womanhood. The ‘‘cardinal virtues’’ of true womanhood—piety, purity, submissiveness , and domesticity—were the standards by which mid-nineteenthcentury white American society judged women,2 and thus to this bureau policy maker, they represented what former slave women should aspire to live by. ‘‘A true, honest, wise woman is the best work of God,’’ he told young freedwomen. ‘‘She is man’s strength,’’ he continued, ‘‘the charm of the household, the attraction of the social circle, the light of the church, and the brightest jewel in the Savior’s crown.’’ ‘‘But,’’ he warned equally, ‘‘a foolish, vain, cross, idle, slovenly woman is the meanest creature that ever clotted the fair creation of God.’’ ‘‘Let it be your first aim,’’ the bureau policy maker pressed, ‘‘to make of yourself a true woman.’’3 ‘‘the dignity and glory of true womanhood’’ 15 For Fisk, like most white Americans, the ideals of true womanhood represented ‘‘the centerpiece of nineteenth-century female identity.’’ But the bureau policy maker’s promotion of the values present in true womanhood went well beyond what he desired for freedwomen. It said a great deal about his gendered notions of freedom. It got at his understanding of the rights and responsibilities of freedom. It spoke to his white, northern, middle-class definitions of womanhood , manhood, and the home—definitions that seemingly rejected the patriarchal households of the slaveholding South, presented freedmen with ‘‘full legal title to citizenship,’’ and welcomed freedwomen ‘‘under the mantle of Victorian purity.’’ It was tied too to the cause of free labor and the job ahead of Fisk and his bureau colleagues, who served as policy makers and enforcers of Reconstruction. For the ‘‘problem’’ faced by the men charged with realizing freedom, as the historian Thomas Holt reminds us, ‘‘was not merely to make ex-slaves work, but to make them into a working class, that is, a class that would submit to the market because it adhered to the values of a bourgeois society: regularity, punctuality, sobriety, frugality, and economic rationality.’’ And acceptance of Victorian gender roles and family relations was part of this charge, for in so many divergent ways household relations represented ‘‘the ties which connect society’’ to mid-nineteenth-century Americans. That Fisk believed it possible for freedwomen to ‘‘make’’ themselves into true women reveals a great deal about what bureau men thought possible at the outset of Reconstruction.4 Brevet Major General Fisk was perhaps the most outspoken bureau policy maker to instruct former slave women and men in the gendered privileges and duties of freedom. So too was he one of the most racially progressive bureau officials. But regardless of his abolitionist, more liberal leanings, Fisk was not alone in his paternalistic desire to school the freedpeople in northern ideas about free labor, domesticity, dependency, and family relations. Although more vocal—indeed frank—than others in offering expressions of how mid-nineteenth -century gender ideology factored into the public policy of Reconstruction , this federal official worked in step with his bureau...

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