Dress and Labor: An Intersectional Interpretation of Clothing and Adornment Artifacts Recovered from the Levi Jordan Plantation

Abstract

Through an examination of clothing, adornment, and hygiene artifacts recovered from the Quarters area of the Levi Jordan Plantation, this article examines how racial, gendered, and classed operations of power and oppression shaped African American women’s sartorial practices, as an aspect of identity formation, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Texas. Through a Black feminist framework, this article focuses on the ways African American women dressed their bodies for the types of labor they performed to discuss how they negotiated ideologies of race, gender, and class, that shaped hegemonic notions of femininity during the post-emancipation era.