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, Cecille 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 that was not designed for them. They owned businesses, accumulated property, pursued litigation, engaged in philanthropy, and provided religious leadership, all while building durable networks of care, education, and spirituality. Avoiding the dangers of outright rebellion, the women employed strategies of gendered resistance-refusal, adaptation, collaboration-that often proved very successful, carving out space for survival in ways that confounded societal expectations of who they could be and what they could accomplish. Morrison draws on a rich trove of archival sources such as censuses, city directories, notarial records, wills, successions, and court cases. Recognizing that these records were produced within white-controlled bureaucratic systems, Making Freedom Work attends closely to both their evidentiary value and their silences. It also confronts the complexities of slaveholding by free people of color, interpreting it as part of a broader struggle for security, status, and distance from enslavement, while emphasizing the uneven and contingent relationships between enslavers and the enslaved. Making Freedom Work reintroduces these women-so often dismissed and devalued in their own time-as central historical actors, highlighting their influence as entrepreneurs, community builders, educators, and mothers of the next generation.
After completing her master's degree, Janet Morrison worked for the British civil service for many years, eventually teaching English in Spain for six years. She received her PhD in American history at the University of East Anglia.
"Meticulously researched and grounded in extensive archival sources, this book illuminates the overlooked histories of free women of color in antebellum New Orleans. Morrison offers a powerful analysis of how women defied stereotypes and reshaped their communities on their own terms."--Marian Crenshaw Austin, independent historian "Making Freedom Work is a fascinating, carefully researched, and well-written study on a unique social group in American history--the free people of color of antebellum New Orleans, or gens de couleur libres, as they called themselves. They were francophone, free, educated, Catholic, astonishingly entrepreneurial, and some of them quite wealthy. Wedged in between the white dominant group and the oppressed enslaved working class of African descent at the bottom of the existing social hierarchies, they created a social and cultural sphere of their own. Defying all odds by their sheer existence, they were an anomaly within the extremely racist, sexist, and class-stratified antebellum American South. By taking a closer look at the lives of five remarkably successful and courageous women within this social group--Henriette Delille, Eulalie Mandeville, Cecile Bonille, Marie Dolores Laveaux, and Marie Couvent--the author offers us a wonderful window into the complexities of their lives and the struggles they and their descendants had to face."--Ina J. Fandrich, author of The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveaux: A Study of Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans "Janet Morrison's deeply researched book is a valuable contribution to the study of the mutually constitutive yet often contradictory roles played by race, gender, and slavery in antebellum New Orleans, a city that offered free people of color opportunities unavailable elsewhere in the United States but was also the hub of the nation's domestic slave trade. Through well-chosen and extensively analyzed case studies, it depicts both the possibilities that these women embraced and the limitations against which they struggled."--Natalie A. Zacek, author of Thoroughbred Nation: Making America at the Racetrack, 1791-1900
