Since the 1990s, two themes have emerged in the historiography of Black women and slave emancipation. The first theme centers on how Black women negotiated the transition to freedom under a variety of competing influences. The second theme centers on the violence that Black women experienced in their transition to freedom. Although numerous books have been devoted to examining the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on former slaves, very few provide a comparative regional perspective of Black women’s experiences.
Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020) is the most recent study to provide an analysis of what the war meant for Black and White women in the North and South. Glymph’s work is a part of a larger historiography that has attempted to move gender to the forefront of our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Earlier studies by Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me (2014), and Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom (2009), which both examine gender and violence, have demonstrated that freedwomen laid claim to full and equal citizenship, to their own conceptions of womanhood, and to access to public spaces that had previously been denied them.