This rich and innovative collection explores the ways in which Black women, from diverse regions of the American South, employed various forms of resistance and survival strategies to navigate one of the most tumultuous periods in American history – the Civil War and Reconstruction era. The essays included shed new light on individual narratives and case studies of women in war and freedom, revealing that Black women recognized they had to make their own freedom, and illustrating how that influenced their postwar political, social and economic lives. Black women and children are examined as self-liberators, as contributors to the family economy during the war, and as widows who relied on kinship and community solidarity. Expanding and deepening our understanding of the various ways Black women seized wartime opportunities and made powerful claims on citizenship, this volume highlights the complexity of their wartime and post-war experiences, and provides important insight into the contested spaces they occupied.

‘The powerful essays in this volume demonstrate that there was not one emancipation but many. Many factors shaped how Black women experienced freedom, and these historians bring the varying local contexts, historical forces, and individual personalities alive with rich detail and sensitivity. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in the Civil War and its legacies.’

Carole Emberton - Author of To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner

‘Karen Cook Bell’s edited work lowers the volume of nineteenth century chatter to discern the small yet impactful voices of African American women. Many of these women are pedestrian citizens whose lives are not documented on the surface of voluminous personal papers and archives, yet their experiences speak to how they lived their lives within constricted racial, gender, and class lines from enslavement through Reconstruction.’

Ida E. Jones - Associate Director of Special Collections & University Archivist, Morgan State University

‘Accessible yet deeply analytical and textured, this collection of essays compels one to vividly see and hear Black women and children as they resisted and navigated the racial and political landscape in Civil War and Reconstruction America.’

Cherisse Jones-Branch - Author of Better Living by Their Own Bootstraps: Black Women's Activism in Rural Arkansas, 1914–1965