Book description
As the Civil War drew to a close, newly emancipated black women workers made their way to Atlanta--the economic hub of the newly emerging urban and industrial south--in order to build an independent and free life on the rubble of their enslaved past. In an original and dramatic work ofâŚ
Why read it?
3 authors picked To 'Joy My Freedom as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Iâve always been a sucker for a good labor strike.
But a labor strike of Black women in the Southâonly a decade removed from slaveryâdemanding dignity, equality, and a living wage so they could simply âenjoy their freedomâ in a region where a rich, white, slaveholding regime was just recently toppled? Thatâs next-level stuff.
Hunter tells the story of this Black female majority who worked in domestic labor in the years following the Civil War. Can you imagine going to work as a wage-earning domestic laborer in the home of your former owner? And then collectively organizing to demand thatâŚ
From Betsy's list on to make you excited about labor history.
Tera Hunterâs classic is simply one of the most imaginative and boundary-shattering labor histories of the last thirty years.
Her openness to the unexpected and her defiance of inherited definitions of labor and labor organization freed a whole generation of historians from their academic straitjackets. It continues to inspire and delight readers of all sorts. Hunter found what no one thought existed: sustained organization and market power exerted by Black laundresses in the post-Civil War south.
No one recognized the collective strength these Black women wielded until Hunter; no one does a better job of piecing together the improbable strategiesâŚ
From Dorothy's list on how working women changed the world.
In the postbellum south, black women did the bulk of the laundry. Tera Hunterâs beautiful book tracks washerwomenâs everyday lives at work and at leisure in Atlanta in the late 19th century. Some of the most inspiring sequences analyze a strike in 1881 on the eve of the International Cotton Exposition. Though washerwomen controlled the conditions of their labor much more than many other domestic workers, they received paltry wages for tough work.
Before the exposition, a washerwoman secret society canvassed the city to recruit all washerwomen to join the work stoppage, and in three weeks, three thousand washerwomenâŚ
From Alison's list on the politics of doing the laundry.
If you love To 'Joy My Freedom...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa storiesâall reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argueâŚ
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