No Longer "Playin’ the Lady": Examining Black Women’s Consumption at the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead

Summary

Archaeological studies of race and consumption have linked black consumer behavior to the negotiation of social and economic exclusion.  While these studies have highlighted blacks’ efforts to define themselves after slavery, they have overlooked black women and how they used consumer goods to aspire towards gendered notions of racial uplift and respectability.  This paper examines the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead, a historic freedman’s site in Travis County, Texas, to describe the nature of black women’s consumption after slavery.  I posit that rural black women’s consumption was in dialogue with conceptions of womanhood which placed an emphasis on domesticity, racial progress and socioeconomic mobility.   The case study of the Williams Farmstead contrasts with more visible examples of black women’s political expression illustrated in their work in churches or the club movement by highlighting the quotidian ways that rural black women strived to perform their own notions of race and womanliness. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Intersectionality as Emancipatory Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 281