Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement

Running head: FREEDOM’S DAUGHTERS
Freedom’s Daughters
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If Americans are asked to name the most significant female leader of civil rights
movement then most of them are likely to take the name of Rosa Parks first, whose objection
and refusal to leave her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus in the year 1955 (Thornton
2014). Beside from her, they are also likely to relate the civil rights movement with the male
leaders of its like Jr. Martin Luther King. However, in this paper I am going to present my
reflection on a book called “Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights
Movement from 1830 to 1870” by Lynne Olson that I read most recently and which is
revolving around the central theme of freedom, women empowerment, the rights of black
women and their role.
Lynne Olson, in the introduction of her book- “Freedom’s Daughters”, have noted
that the women at those times were completely not allowed to take part in the prominent
events of the ones of the pinnacle events of the movement of March of Washington that was
held in the year 1963 (Cooperman et al. 2016). There was no women who addressed the
crowd and also none was there to meet with the President Kennedy. I was completely
surprised to know that. How could an event be organised and successfully completed without
any presence of women? The introduction itself was enough to depict the real image of the
condition of the women during those times. I also found that despite of their exclusion from
most of the public events related to civil rights movement, both the white and black have
served without any sort of recognition as a backbone of the struggles for the racial equality
prevailing in United States. In this book, Lynne has uncovered the stories of these “unsung
heroines” and has also provided enough number of considerations to all the tensions of
gender and race which both the white and the black women in their struggle for equality
(Hawkman, Andrea and Antonio 2017). I have also found a division made by her at the same
time. I must say, the book has indeed presented a vivid examples of the white and black
female activists perfectly as they all depict the delicate balance in between the fighting for the

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gender and racial equality, which the black women maintained all through the civil rights
movement.
It is also to state that Lynne has made three key assertions in the prologue of the book
and that has guided her discussion all through the rest of her book. Firstly, she has argued that
the involvement of the women in the struggle for racial equality has begun way before the
Civil War, which is quite true as I have heard about the same in many other journal and
novels like Reconstructing Sexual Equality by Christine Littleton and Beyond the pale: White
women, racism, and history by Vron Ware (Littleton 2018; Ware 2015). However, after
reading this book, I have learnt that the efforts of the free black women and the slaves have
contributed to the activism of the women in civil rights movement. Lynne has also asserted
that at each and every turn, the women who did fight for the civil rights have well-balanced
their roles as the activities as mothers ad wives and with the same, they have also developed a
complex relationships with all the men who were engaged in the very movement. I have also
learnt about the fact that the black woman were perceived as a figure of Jezebel (Katz et al.
2018). Jezebel refers to an over sexualised image of the black womanhood that were
reinforced by the rejections and objectifications of the early owners of slaves who had raped
them. Lastly, Lynne has argued about the fact that the different complexities of race and
gender have created tensions among the white and black women who used to work for the
civil rights and that, at times, have impeded the progress of the movement as because the
black and the white women were forced to choose one among siding with the back men for
the issue of racial equality and the white women for gender equality.
Moreover, the stories of the “unsung heroines” who took part in the civil movements
that Lynne makes use of support her main arguments are one of the strongest aspects of her
work. She has weaved all her main arguments through each and every women that she has
introduced in the book. Like, for example, she has used the stories of Ida Mae “Cat” Holland