Freedom Narratives of African American Women: A Study of 19th Century Writings

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While narratives of enslavement have become more central to conversations about African American women’s writing, this book first discusses the genre of narratives of freedom and then examines women’s relationships to the community as they seek to illustrate a collective free identity. I argue that these texts represent a sense of civil rights that emerges prior even to the ideas of racial uplift that reached a height for women in the late nineteenth century and moved into the twentieth century.
Under the umbrella of freedom narratives, this book also reads black women’s narratives of education, individual progress, marriage and family, labor, and intellectual commitments to see how they both reflect and produce national and community rebuilding projects. I argue that black women define freedom through all of the means listed above, but what is most significant for the purposes of their writing is freedom to choose their paths and to tell their own stories, in their own words and on their own terms.