A Fragile Freedom; African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City

by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

• ISBN13: 9780300125917
• ISBN10: 0300125917
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2008-04-01
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

This book is the first to chronicle the lives of African American women in the urban north during the early years of the republic.A Fragile Freedominvestigates how African American women in Philadelphia journeyed from enslavement to the precarious status of "free persons" in the decades leading up to the Civil War and examines comparable developments in the cities of New York and Boston. Erica Armstrong Dunbar argues that early nineteenth-century Philadelphia, where most African Americans were free, enacted a kind of rehearsal for the national emancipation that followed in the postCivil War years. She explores the lives of the "regular" women of antebellum Philadelphia, the free black institutions that took root there, and the previously unrecognized importance of African American women to the history of American cities.

Author Biography

Erica Armstrong Dunbar is associate professor of history, University of Delaware. She lives in Wyncote, PA.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Slavery and the "Holy Experiment"	p. 8
Maneuvering Manumission in Philadelphia: African American Women and Indentured Servitude	p. 26
Creating Black Philadelphia: African American Women and Their Neighborhoods	p. 48
Voices from the Margins: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1833-1840	p. 70
Writing for Womanhood: African American Women and Print Culture	p. 96
A Mental and Moral Feast: Reading, Writing, and Sentimentality in Black Philadelphia	p. 120
Conclusion	p. 148
Notes	p. 151
Bibliography	p. 175
Index	p. 189
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