Making Freedom Work: Free Women of Color in Antebellum New Orleans

Making Freedom Work tells the stories of five free women of color in antebellum New Orleans.The lives of Eulalie Mandeville, Henriette Delille, Marie Couvent, Cécille Bonille, and Marie Dolores Laveaux reveal the economic, legal, and cultural strategies free Black women used to move through a racially stratified, patriarchal slave society.Janet Morrison argues that free women of color could play a crucial role in the city's economic, religious, and communal life, even as they navigated and contested the restraints placed upon them by their race and gender.Foregrounding the voices of these women and their families, Morrison recovers stories that have long been marginalized in New Orleans history. During a period of profound transformation in New Orleans-including French and Spanish colonial legacies, imposed American racial hierarchies after the Louisiana Purchase, and increased mobility within the Atlantic world-these five women found numerous ways to exercise their agency in a world t