The clothes on her back: interpreting sartorial practices of self-making at the Levi Jordan Plantation

In the midst of social reform and the rise of mass produced goods that defined the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Black women were pinning their hair up with combs, lacing glass beads around their necks, dyeing coarse-cotton fabric with sumac berries and walnuts, and fastening buttons to adorn their bodies and dress their social lives. This project addresses one central question: How did race, gender, and class operations of power and oppression shape African American women's identity formation during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Texas? This project addresses this question using archaeological and documentary evidence, by investigating why African American women engaged in particular practices of dress and adornment in Texas from 1865 to 1910. I focus my research on the clothing, adornment, and grooming artifacts recovered from the Levi Jordan Plantation (LJP), where African American families lived and labored as tenants, wage laborers, and sharecroppers. Under the umbrella of my central question, I ask:

1. In what ways were sartorial practices embedded in relations and ideologies of race, gender, and class, and how did Black women negotiate these operations of power and oppression through dress?
2. Given the relationship between fashion and the construction of hegemonic notions of femininity, are Black women's clothing and adornment practices representative of resistance and/or conformity to these notions? Is there evidence of formations of a distinctive Black womanhood?
3. As African American women moved through various spaces (at home, at work, and in public spaces) during a time of heightened racial oppression, how were their choices regarding dress influenced? In what ways were their sartorial practices situational to the spaces they occupied? Through a Black feminist intersectional lens, I attempt to answer these questions by interpreting the ways practices of dress engaged in by African Americans at the LJP were shaped by race, gender, and class operations of power and oppression within spheres of labor at home and beyond. This work examines how these operations of power and oppression shaped and were shaped by constructions of Black womanhood - as seen through sartorial practices - within spheres of labor, as well as through the threat of racialized and gendered violence, the desire for self-expression, and processes of social reproduction.