Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861-1875.

Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of Household in the Delta, 1861-1875. By Nancy Bercaw. Southern Dissent. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2003. Pp. xviii, 279. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8130-2788-8; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8130-2591-5.)

In this well-researched study, Nancy Bercaw explores how the U.S. Civil War and emancipation ushered in new gender norms and domestic relations among white and black southerners and how evolving gender ideologies conditioned the terms of postemancipation contests over labor and rights in the South. She unites these two explorations in her focus on what she terms the "politics of household," where household refers both to actual families and to an idealized white antebellum image of a plantation household, a patriarch benevolently ruling the lives and labor of his wife, children, and slaves (p. 3). Throughout the book, Bercaw argues that household, understood as both practice and rhetoric, was literally the site and figuratively the language of key postemancipation political struggles.

Bercaw locates her study in the mid-nineteenth-century Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, offering a welcome addition to the more common studies of the demise of older, more established slave societies in the East. She argues that in this "frontier society" (with great distances between plantations, poor roads, and few churches and schools), households--those of both African Americans and plantation owners--structured antebellum existence (p. 8). Bercaw then narrates the transformation of these institutions in two parts. The first tells of the dispersion and dissolution

of antebellum households as a result of the war. The second part explores what happened after the war' s end when individuals reunited under new circumstances to construct a society without slavery. Bercaw finds that all groups invoked a discourse of the household--"the one institution that they held in common"--to articulate evolving identities, roles, and rights (p. 16). Yet she emphasizes that when speaking of household each group had something very different in mind.

Southern white men sought to reclaim exclusive political and economic power by recreating the social relations of the plantation household. Bercaw finds this drive in the efforts of planters to cast slaves-turned-plantation-employees as dependents rather than as contracting workers. Many white women also looked back wistfully to antebellum days, for the most part deferring to the authority of white men. Some, however, experienced tension between their past identities as dependents and the new economic roles demanded of them by wartime deaths or disabilities of fathers and husbands. African Americans sought to establish households independent of the plantation household and its structures of white domination and thus to forge a new, relatively autonomous existence. But where men and women would stand in relationship to each other within these households and whether men would hold authority over the property and labor of family members and act as the sole representative of their wives and children in public affairs remained uncertain.

Here Bercaw builds on previous scholarship exploring the household as a patriarchal discourse among whites by examining how after emancipation black southerners resisted or adapted this vision for social order. In numerous government records, Bercaw has uncovered evidence illuminating the dynamics of actual households of freedpeople. She describes a variety of family forms and divisions of labor adopted by former slaves, who "privileg[ed] flexibility" in family economies and relations of obligation and authority between women and men (p. 110). She also finds divergences between men's and women's ideals for family arrangements in freedom that she argues were rooted in discrepant wartime experiences. For instance, during the war, while African American men served in the army or traveled in search of work, freedwomen created extended female-headed households as a means of pooling resources. African American men who joined the army had far less independence from white discourses and control. Constrained by army policies, such as commanders allowing soldiers to have contact with wives but not sweethearts, black men began to perceive that patriarchal roles within legally recognized families could legitimate their rights. A growing preference for formal marriage was furthered after the war, when planters insisted on contracting with married male heads-of-household. All this led freedpeople working on plantations to embrace male-headed, two-parent families and encouraged black men to adopt patriarchal roles. Women at times acquiesced to and at other times rebelled against "men's gendered definition of rights based on patriarchal assumptions of household authority" (p. 155).

Yet much of the evidence for black men's "patriarchal assumptions of household authority" in the 1860s comes from statements made to pension examiners decades later and thus reveals little about what they were thinking at the time. Indeed, the rich evidence presented in this study occasionally defies Bercaw's arguments about freedpeople's gender norms. Her study reveals a wide range of norms being developed and tested by black men and women, especially in the first decade after emancipation. Bercaw thus shines new light on the complexity of gender roles and identities during the Reconstruction era while also demonstrating how powerfully the discourse and practice of the household framed postemancipation contests over labor relations and political rights.

HANNAH ROSEN

University of Michigan