Women's Radical Reconstruction Summary

In the book Women’s Radical Reconstruction, Carol Faulkner, who specializes in 19th-century America, U.S. women, gender, sexuality, and social movements, expressed that the Freedmen’s aid movement brought to light arguments of race, gender, and equal rights and began the concept of the Reconstruction should be founded on justice and national responsibility.Also, she described how the women’s push for gender reform would cause a schism between the Americans and white women. In addition, the Women’s Radical Reconstruction, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2004 in Philadelphia, describes how these freedmen societies needed the support of federal and Northern intervention which caused women to be more involved in politics and …show more content…
The author’s purpose is to demonstrate how the Reconstruction brought both racial and women reform that would affect the present. Due to Faulkner’s writing style and in-depth knowledge of the time period, Faulkner wrote to an audience with backgrounds of history and or sociology and to anyone researching topics of race and women reform. In the first chapter, Faulkner described the social tensions over whether theses actions of benevolence are causing dependency or contributing to freedmen being self-supporting. The author conveyed the point that in the first experiment it was gender that shaped theses tensions in the freedmen’s movement, which started in 1861. Carol Faulkner utilized secondary sources …show more content…
First of all, the education shift was not a great success, so the American Freedmen’s Union Commission, which had focused on education, failed to be what it was originally envisioned for. However, these women still desired to commit themselves to the freedmen’s aid through strategies of letters and pleas which keep the movement alive and furthered the progress of the movement. The fourth chapter narrows down on African American women in the freedmen’s aid movement. These women embraced that they were two minorities and decided they deserved authority during this movement. These women also furthered the freedmen’s movement and women’s right movement, but they had to fight to get on the same platform of black men and white women. While the previous chapters talked about division, the fifth chapter described the Freedmen’s Bureau and their efforts on trying to obtain material aid, but this also caused hostility towards freedpeople and women