African American Women Essay

Every woman today despite their race or gender have equal opportunity and rights according to the law. In the late nineteenth century there was uncompromising differences between the north and south regions of the United States over the power of the U.S government to prohibit slavery in territories that weren’t states yet, which was a catalyst to the Civil War. The south was defeated and slavery was abolished in every state and was prohibited in any territory that would become a state. The Civil War left every gender, race, and class to lead different lives that they had to eventually assimilate to. Reconstruction was the period of time immediately after the Civil War. During this time the Constitution was under revision, the south needed rebuilding, the north and south needed to be …show more content…
The South passed black codes to limit the newly emancipated slave’s freedoms by enforcing laws such as freed people may not own a gun or work in trades. Another issue was that black women worked alongside men in fields while they were slaves and once they were emancipated, husbands resented the whites and didn’t want their wives working for them. African American women’s labor was displaced and there weren’t many options for them. Former slave husbands also had a lot of anger from being enslaved and in some cases would take that anger out on the wife or even his children. Women from the north came to the south to teach black women to be teachers in efforts to raise the amount of education blacks were receiving, which also led to all black schools being created. Women’s suffrage was beginning to become an issue in this era, but black women didn’t believe that their lack of the right to vote was an attack on their race or their gender, they still attended political meetings and instead told their husbands who to vote