Embodying Justice: Black Women Confront Intimate Partner Violence from Emancipation to the Vote

Embodying Justice: Black Women Confront Intimate Partner Violence from Emancipation to the Vote is a six-chapter historical monograph. It begins in the first decades after enslavement when Black women tested the limits of civic freedom and bodily autonomy—after all, this was the first time that Black women possessed legal rights to their own bodies. When published, this will be the first book to investigate Black women’s lives through the lens of intimate partner violence from the end of slavery and the passage of the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to African Americans, to passage of the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote. The book pivots on the notion of “embodied justice”—that is how Black women responded to bodily abuse by enacting their own forms of justice. This project argues that African American women galvanized nearly a decade earlier than their white counterparts to fight against domestic violence. As survivors and sometimes perpetrators of violence, Black women hit, fought, fled, stayed, died, reported and /or testified, administered care, and mobilized to protect their lives, and often the lives of their children while shaping larger struggles for African American freedom and justice in the United States. 

Photo credit: Black Women Suffragists, Library of Congress.