Browsing by Subject "African American Women"

Despite the significant contributions made by African American women since the Black Church's founding, titles like pastor, bishop, and reverend for centuries have been freely awarded to men while being restricted to women. The leadership of black clergywomen in these roles traditionally held by men helps to challenge the stereotypes of what it means to be a leader. Black clergywomen's contributions to religious institutions like the Black Church are frequently only remembered through the prism of deconstruction. In an effort to not only deconstruct but also reconstruct the church into a more equitable organization, this study explores how the ministries of black clergywomen from the early 19th to the late 20th century undermine male domination and patriarchal normativity within Christianity. Using memoirs, interviews, sermons, and lectures, assumes that black clergywomen's transformative leadership is disruptive epistemologically, politically, and anthropologically. This study will demonstrate how different leadership avenues were altered or established as a result of the experiences of these African American preaching women by evaluating their lives and ministerial work. This essay intends to demonstrate how black clergywomen's ministries challenge orthodox beliefs, rituals, and theologies, opening up new avenues of leadership for themselves and others.

Geographies of Freedom explores the ways in which free and enslaved black women pursued freedom for themselves and their families in the middle Mississippi River Valley using the law and uniquely gendered access to forms of labor, mobility, and the special configurations of the region. The river-centric economy and the fluid mobility of goods, people, and ideas across state borders there begs the study of the region expanding out from the confluence of the western rivers as a unique site to explore questions of mobility, geography, slavery, and freedom.

My dissertation argues that black women actively navigated the roiling world of the antebellum middle Mississippi River Valley-a region that offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand some of the most historically significant cultural, political, and economic shifts of the nineteenth century anew. The black women I discuss lived in a world being transformed by an increasingly market driven economy and attendant reconstructions of labor organization. At the same time, the demographic landscape was shifting, new industries and public social spaces emerged, and the conflict over the political geography of slavery and freedom heightened. Amidst the chaos, black women found access to mobility, economic opportunity, and even the law, which they used to pursue freedom. From court records, slave testimonies, newspapers, government records, manuscript collections and contemporary popular literature, I extract narratives of black women as migrants, laborers, litigants, and agents of their own lives in a border region perpetually in the process of making itself.

By running away, suing for their freedom or that of their children, and achieving economic stability, black women embodied the very promise of capitalism and democracy that most white men flocked to the river valley to pursue. In doing so, they threatened hardening notions of gender inequality and racial control. My dissertation shows that as they continued to act in these self-determined ways, black women fueled an accelerating political conflict over race and slavery in the border region leading up the Civil War. They challenged slave holders' claims to their bodies, their labor, and their children, and they forced judges and attorneys in the region to reevaluate laws around slavery, freedom, and property. In the aftermath of the Civil War, black women retained these methods of strategically appealing to the law and using their mobility and extended networks of communication to organize and maintain control over their lives.