They faced formidable resistance within their own communities even as they willingly took on new roles: “In bed,” Hartman writes of one lesbian couple, “it seemed like it was only the two of them in the world, in the vast stillness of the deep of night. In one Philadelphia area, for instance, “more than half the women in the ward were single, widowed, or separated, and this imperiled the newly fledged black family”-imperiled it because so many of those unencumbered women were determined to live on their own terms, having begun a journey to freedom that was ongoing. The population, writes the author, was young and in many cases disproportionately female, with liberating follow-on consequences. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, 2007, etc.) examines the many ways in which (mostly) young black women tried to live their lives within the confines of new urban enclaves such as Harlem and West Philadelphia, from which Italian and Jewish immigrants had moved on and into which newcomers from the South were streaming. A provocative study of urban African-American women a century and more ago.Ĭharacterizing her work as an “account of the wayward,” literary scholar Hartman (English/Columbia Univ.
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