Lecture at Louisiana Tech to Focus On Freed Women in Post-Civil War South

In the continuing series of events celebrating Women’s History Month at Louisiana Tech, the department of history and the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, Inc., have announced a special lecture by Dr. Mary Farmer-Kaiser of the department of history at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. 

The event is scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday, March 28 in Wyly Tower Auditorium.  Admission is free and the talk is open to the public.

Farmer-Kaiser will speak on “Frustrating Freedom: Freedwomen, Unpardonable Sins, and the Gendered Awakening of Federal Emancipation, 1865-1868.” 

Farmer-Kaiser argues that issues of gender were central in the emancipation process in the U.S. South that freed thousands of slaves from bondage.  Her talk will be based upon the research she completed for her recent book, Freedwomen and the Freedmen's Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation, published by Fordham University Press in 2010.

The book details the work of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands (commonly known as "the Freedmen's Bureau"), established by Congress in early 1865, which assumed the task of overseeing the transition from slavery to freedom in the post-Civil War South. Although it was called the Freedmen's Bureau, the agency profoundly affected African-American women. Farmer-Kaiser examines the gendered assumptions at work in Bureau efforts and reveals how freedwomen served as active agents of change.

For more information, contact Dr. Laurie Stoff, coordinator of events, at 318-257-5480 or lstoff@latech.edu.