Armed Women at the Polling Grounds: Black Rural Working Women's Struggle Against Election-Day Segregation in South Carolina, 1874–1895

Abstract

This article examines testimony about Black rural women's physical, sometimes violent, interventions in Reconstruction era South Carolina elections to illuminate the relationship between race, space and gender in shaping power and access to it. Election-day ballot boxes became identified as spaces of gendered exclusion after the enfranchisement of Black adult male residents in 1867 and created expectations of gendered segregation nearby. But Black women violated and tested those norms to claim their role in creating a cohesive, sometimes-coercive political community.