Black Women’s Networks and Identities in the Early Republic

Abstract: Racism, anti-Black terror, labor exploitation, sexual violence, and the expansion of slavery in the early republic made it necessary for Black women—Northern and Southern, free and enslaved—to forge a distinct political culture. Black feminist historical analysis recasts Republican motherhood as a racialized construct rooted in the exploitation of Black women during the long 19th century. Scholars have fruitfully reconstructed and analyzed the social and cultural implications of Black women’s networks within Black communities in the Antebellum South. This essay calls attention to the political dimensions of women's social networks, where they nurtured ideas about legal culture, fugitivity, and protection in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Expanding the political sphere by prioritizing the concerns of enslaved and free Black women and girls enriches the conceptual categories we explore to analyze politics and political culture in the early republic—and it helps us see the political implications of women’s actions and bodies in ways not available from within the most prominent paradigms for studying women’s history.