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Still digesting & reacting to @adamgopnik's new essay in @NewYorker about Reconstruction. But among the questions at the forefront of my mind: Where are the women? newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
Where is @TeraHunter's account of African Americans' creative struggle before & after emancipation to win recognition of their marriages & families, a history that challenges his revival of Elkins's comparison of slavery to concentration camps?
Where is Chandra Manning's Troubled Refuge and its narrative of how women and children in "contraband camps" made new claims on the state and challenged prevailing notions of dependency?
Where is @KidadaEWilliams's accounting of the many courageous women (and men) who gave testimonies of racial violence before Congress during and after Reconstruction?
Where is @katemasur's depiction of African Americans in Civil War era Washington, D.C., as a community that incubated grassroots political activism aimed at equal rights, not just artistic and cultural expression?
Where is Hannah Rosen's history of the struggle by African American women during Reconstruction to defend the integrity of their bodies against sexual violence and exercise their rights as citizens?
What was Ida B. Wells's view (not just Douglass's) of what Gopnik calls "the Great Betrayal"? How were suffragists like Stanton and Anthony implicated in the retreat of liberal reformers from radical Reconstruction? Where is the sexual politics of The Birth of a Nation?
I could go on ... much more needs to be said about women in Reconstruction (much of it said already by women themselves) to take the measure of the era & current debate about it. Begin by noticing, eg, that all of the figures in that 1872 lithograph are men. Where were the women?
One answer: in courtrooms. In civil lawsuits of black litigants against white defendants surveyed by @MilewskiMelissa in her new book, around 40 percent of the plaintiffs were black women such as Lurena Roebuck. tah.oah.org/november-2017/…
And black women were leaders in what Gopnik calls the "the autonomous family and church, pillars of the black community that emerged during Reconstruction." Though erased in images like the 1872 lithograph, black women's politics in those pillars were crucial.
See @marthasjones_, for example, on how black churchwomen in the AMEZ church struggled for and won the right to vote in the denomination ... in 1876. What does that do to our narratives of the "end" of Reconstruction?
Or go back to Hunter's first book on black washerwomen who went on strike in Atlanta, 1879-1881? How might their experience complicate Gopnik's criticism of DuBois for supposedly pitting "property and privilege” against “race and culture” as explanations?
(And oops, that's @TeraWHunter, not @terahunter, I'm referring too.)
(And double oops, what I meant to say was "to" not "too.")
