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b"Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston\\n\\nFor black women in antebellum Charleston, freedom was not a static legal category but a fragile and contingent experience. A deeply researched social history,\\xa0Forging Freedom\\xa0reveals the ways in which black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own vision of freedom.\\n\\nDrawing on legislative and judicial materials, probate data, tax lists, church records, family papers, and more, Myers creates detailed portraits of individual women while exploring how black female Charlestonians sought to create a fuller freedom by improving their financial, social, and legal standing. Examining both those who were officially manumitted and those who lived as free persons but lacked official documentation, Myers reveals that free black women filed lawsuits and petitions, acquired property (including slaves), entered into contracts, paid taxes, earned wages, attended schools, and formed familial alliances with wealthy and powerful men, black and white--all in an effort to solidify and expand their freedom. Never fully free, black women had to depend on their skills of negotiation in a society dedicated to upholding both slavery and patriarchy.\\xa0Forging Freedom\\xa0thus examines the many ways in which Charleston's black women crafted a freedom of their own design instead of accepting the limited existence imagined for them by white Southerners.\\n\\nAmrita Chakrabarti Myers earned\\xa0her doctorate in American History from Rutgers University. A historian of the black female experience, she is interested in race, gender, sexuality, rights, freedom, and citizenship and the ways in which these constructs intersect with one another in the lives of black women in the Old South.\\xa0She is currently Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana."