Women's Radical Reconstruction: the Freedmen's Aid Movement.

Women's Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen's Aid Movement. By Carol Faulkner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, c. 2004. Pp. [viii], 200. $39.95, ISBN 0-8122-3744-7.)

Carol Faulkner's fascinating and important book focuses on the role of northern black and white women in the freedmen's aid movement from roughly 1861 to 1877. Faulkner's central claim is that these women offered a "vision of Reconstruction [that] included political equality for women and African Americans, protection for former slaves, and national responsibility for slavery" (p. 152). Lobbying vigorously for universal suffrage, federal aid and education, employment, and the redistribution of land, these "abolitionist-feminists" believed that the government was obligated to repay its debt to former slaves. At their most radical, they argued that dependency and poverty were inevitable consequences of an unequal society, not indicators of racial inferiority or innate character flaws. Nonetheless, these women believed in the virtues of industry, thrift, cleanliness, and wage labor to bring about economic independence, and they remained concerned that direct aid might produce greater "dependency and pauperization" (p. 151). That they ultimately failed to achieve their goal was due not to "racism or internal factionalism," Faulkner argues, but "because most Republican politicians and Freedmen's Bureau agents [white men] embraced a different vision of Reconstruction, one that prized economic freedom and independence over the repayment of social debts and equal rights" (pp. 151, 3).

Faulkner focuses on a particular cohort of white and black women, examining their relationships with one another, as well as with male leaders of the American Freedmen's Union Commission. Among the white women we find Josephine S. W. Griffing, Julia A. Wilbur, Sallie Holley, Caroline Putnam, Emily Howland, and Cornelia Hancock. These single women sought employment in the freedmen's aid movement, becoming teachers, distributing governmental and private aid, and in Howland's and Hancock's cases, buying land and employing freedpeople as farmers in the hope that their labor would enable them to purchase the land they worked. In a separate chapter, Faulkner discusses how black women--Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charlotte Forten, Rebecca Primus, and Elizabeth Keckley--envisioned their role as "mothers of the race" (chap. 4). In representing these black women as "occupying a middle ground between freedpeople and northern whites," Faulkner untangles a complex world of class and cultural tensions (p. 67).

Some of the most interesting material comes in the form of anecdotes that illuminate how the free labor ideology and feminist aspirations of northern white middle-class women conflicted with freedpeople's desire for autonomy. Chapters 7 and 8 offer vivid examples of white women purposefully separating young girls from their mothers and sending them north to work as domestic servants. Freedpeople complained that agents (both white and black ones) were trafficking in blacks. White women, in turn, were critical of freedpeople's laziness when they refused employment. Faulkner is fully appreciative of the tragic irony in this situation, noting that "the migration system pushed freedpeople into specific employments that exacerbated the crisis of family disruption and recapitulated pre-emancipation domestic arrangements" (p. 127). But she is also careful to point out that Griffing, who pushed northern migration, did so believing that life in the North offered "'compensating labor and protection of law and humanity,"' whereas "the Freedmen's Bureau urged, and sometimes coerced, freedpeople to migrate to plantations in the South and Southwest" (p. 117).

Faulkner brilliantly captures a moment in U.S. history when working relationships between northern white and black women in the freedmen's aid movement were possible. But, as Faulkner tells us, white women's abolitionist and feminist ideals foundered when confronted with the complexity of African American lives. Thinking that "they understood freedwomen," white women found themselves embroiled in conflicts over wage labor, standards of domesticity, and freedwomen's conception of freedom, which included "family reconstitution, self-ownership, independence from whites, and the right to compensation for their labor" (p. 147). Faulkner's great achievement is to show us not only how these conflicts revealed the limits of sisterhood but also how they "gave birth to a dynamic, if still divided, postwar women's political culture" (p. 149).

LOUISE NEWMAN

University of Florida