From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedmen's Bureau in Arkansas, 1865-1869
By Randy Finley
Published by University of Arkansas Press, 1996
Original from the University of Virginia
Digitized Jan 15, 2008
ISBN 1557284237, 9781557284235
229 pages
Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed fundamentally from those of northern women and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by applying models derived from New England sources.