Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (review)

In Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau, Mary Farmer-Kaiser analyzes the interactions between freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau and determines that the women themselves played an active role in defining every aspect of their lives after emancipation. This important work expands on the findings of Reconstruction and Freedmen's Bureau historians who have previously all but ignored the relationship between black women and the bureau. In contrast, Farmer-Kaiser's research demonstrates that the policies of Reconstruction were not only framed by northern gender and free labor ideologies (which continually touted the sanctity of labor contracts), but were also shaped by the freedwomen themselves. Freedwomen could benefit from the bureau and its policies when they positioned themselves according to nineteenth-century gender norms, but they also had to be assertive as they worked to control their own lives and labors and used the bureau to pursue their own objectives. The bureau's efforts to reconstruct labor and domestic relations for African Americans were thus a two-way street, even as agents themselves could be both allies and adversaries in this relationship.

Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau, number 14 in the Reconstructing America series, covers broadly the years 1865, when the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands was established, through 1872, when it was officially dismantled. Farmer-Kaiser relies heavily on bureau field office records from Virginia, Texas, Georgia, and Louisiana, not only for the geographic diversity these states represent, but also because these manuscript sources proved invaluable in shedding light on the "gendered responses" of local bureau agents to official bureau policy and to the assertiveness of freedwomen.

The volume begins with an examination of the bureau's "gendered vision" of freedom for black women, a vision that embraced domesticity, dependency, and the idea of the "true woman" while at the same time embracing a free labor ideology that depended on the notion of self-support and contract. To bureau agents, the idea of contract served as the governing model for all social relations, including both domestic and labor relations. Agents, therefore, encouraged freedwomen to make themselves into "true women" by obtaining both a legal marriage and a labor contract, as "free compensated labor" and "legal marriage" were both seen as necessary for the reconstruction (or "regularization") of domestic relations. It was possible—and expected—for freedwomen to be both contracted workers and dutiful wives and mothers.

Farmer-Kaiser examines four specific areas of bureau policy—material relief, vagrancy, the regulation of parental rights, and securing justice—and demonstrates that the experiences of freedwomen and freedmen could, and often did, diverge significantly as a result of agents' northern gender ideology. Sometimes this ideology worked in favor of freedwomen; other times it did not. For example, freedwomen could be beneficiaries of direct aid if deemed "worthy" by bureau agents. To be considered worthy, it was not enough for a freedwoman to demonstrate that she was working but still unable to make ends meet. Rather, she could be seen as "fit" for employment yet unemployed because she was raising small children without a husband. An unemployed freedman, however, would almost always be considered a vagrant unworthy of receiving material relief. Thus, freedwomen's role as mothers at least partly determined their status as worthy of the bureau's protection.

Although the Freedmen's Bureau could provide such gendered protections for freedwomen, agents could also be adversaries in freedwomen's attempts to define and control their lives. This was especially true with regard to freedwomen's claims to parental rights and efforts to protect their children from apprenticeship. Immediately following emancipation, freedwomen asserted unrestricted rights to their children. But the apprenticeship system, seen as necessary by many whites to secure labor and as a means of racial control, served as a major roadblock to real autonomy for freedwomen and their...