2025/08/18 by Gregory P. Downs · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #American History and Culture #Race, History, and American Society
paper · doi:10.1111/1468-0424.70012
openalex publication_date 2025/08/18 · openalex created_date 2025/08/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
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.