To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

Compare and contrast the New South and the Old South. What role did African-American women’s labor play in the New South?

Upon what resources and strengths did working-class black women rely to organize the washerwomen’s strike?

Describe working-class black women’s identity as represented in the book.

Hunter describes relationships between working-class African-American women and their white employers as “[t]he story of the dialectic of repression and resistance” (238). Describe the different stages of that conflict.

Although white employers engaged in strenuous efforts to regulate the bodies of their black domestic workers, middle-class African Americans also sought to control the lives of black laborers. Why did they engage in such an effort?

Hunter devotes two chapters in the book to discussing leisure in the lives of the black working-class. Why does she focus on leisure activities in her history of labor during this time and period? 

Discuss Atlanta as a symbol of the New South.

Review Chapter 9 and explain how tuberculosis went from being a disease associated with whites to one associated with black servants. Please also discuss contemporary examples of panics over contagion in your own lifetime or in the 21st century.