Martha Freeman

Living with the dual burdens of racism and sexism, slave women in the plantation South assumed roles within the family and community that contrasted sharply with traditional female roles in the larger American society. Ar'n't I a Woman? reviews the scholarship on slave women and the slave family, exploring new ways of understanding the intersection of race and gender and comparing the myths that stereotyped female slaves with the realities of their lives. This groundbreaking study shows us how black women experienced freedom in the Reconstruction South -- their heroic struggle to gain their rights, hold their families together, resist economic and sexual oppression, and maintain their sense of womanhood against all odds.

This book helps contextualize being a former slave and household employee as an African American woman. Women referred to as Mammies are remembered by whites as faithful slaves but that doesn’t resemble the life or characteristics of actual enslaved women. This book gives historical events and memories that will help you understand the truth of how enslaved and household employee women were treated. This book can help give insight into the unseen dynamics of household employees in white families. For example, many household employees were outwardly portrayed as valuable members of the family, and while it is true that they were valuable, they were hardly given the same respect or rights as white members of the family. This book reveals the truth and has citable examples of proof, such as a custody lawsuit, national monument proposals, and advertising. The book also includes a comprehensive and thorough explanation of the terms “aunt” and “auntie”. Micki McElya starts and finishes the book with the story of how the made-up character of “Aunt Jemima” is a good example of how “Aunt” is used to cling onto previous political and cultural ideas that some Americans don't want to let go of yet. All of the stories and events show that America isn't ready to let go of glorifying the “faithful slave”.

As Black women left the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, Black cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the 20th century, most Black women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, Sharpless evokes Black women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.

Shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over 50 people, these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South. The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration. Their perspectives as servants who left for better opportunities outside of the South offer an original telling of physical and psychological survival in a racially oppressive caste system.

This groundbreaking book traces the mammy figure and what it has symbolized at various historical moments that are linked to phases in America's racial consciousness. The author shows how representations of Mammy have loomed over the American literary and cultural imagination, an influence so pervasive that only a comprehensive and integrated approach of this kind can do it justice.

Susan Tucker presents a revealing collection of oral-history narratives that explore the complex, sometimes enigmatic bond between Black female domestic workers and their white employers from the turn of the twentieth century to the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. Based on interviews with forty-two women of both races from the Deep South, these narratives express the full range of human emotions and successfully convey the ties that united―and the tensions and conflicts that separated―these two mutually dependent groups of women.
***See also Mary Yelling, and Susan Tucker. “Not Forgotten: Twenty-Five Years Out from Telling Memories: Conversations Between Mary Yelling and Susan Tucker.” Southern Cultures, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 93–101. JSTOR***

Marlon Riggs' Emmy-winning documentary that takes viewers on a disturbing voyage through American history, tracing for the first time the deep-rooted stereotypes which have fueled anti-Black prejudice. The film segment that discusses the Mammy Figure in detail is 12.44 - 16.41. In this section, they discuss how Mammy was perceived by the general public, and how her character was used as a defense for slavery.