Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters: Thinking About Same-sex Familial Relationships and Resistance to Racism

Summary

This paper will focus on rethinking how we consider family as part of the apparatus for combatting racism in 19th-century New England. This institution has been documented as a vital force for the survival of African American men and women who faced racial hostility throughout the United States, in both enslaved and free contexts. Inspired by black feminist theorists such as E.F. White and Gloria Joseph, this paper asks how same-sex relationships within families contributed to the strength of this institution. In what ways were female same-sex relationships between mothers and daughters, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, and between sisters fostered through the material world in everyday domestic settings? How did these relationships help to reiterate or change family structure? How did women use these connections to combat ideologies of racial inequality? This paper takes as a case study the women of the multigenerational family that lived at the Seneca Boston-Florence Higginbotham House on Nantucket in the early-mid 19th century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2014   •
• ‘Black Yankees’ and the African Diaspora: Contemporary Perspectives on the Archaeology of African Americans in New England

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): SYM-37,05