“They Bid Defiance to Any Force Whatever”: Fugitive Women and Defensive Violence in the Antebellum Tidewater

This paper investigates Black women’s use of violence as a strategy of self-defense and community protection in Tidewater Virginia – a gesture toward fuller understanding of the previously undetected breadth of fugitive women’s resistive actions. Longstanding gendered notions of masculinized prolonged flight and marronage fail to recognize that women, alongside men, engaged in, or were ready to engage in the use of force to sustain evasion. But reading available archives differently, beyond and through the hypervisibility of fugitive men in armed defense, locates fugitive women’s shared willingness to embrace violence as a last-resort necessity of endurance and resistance to capture. Enslaved women and fugitive women alike were, if driven to it, prepared to physically fight for their lives, and those of their communities. Both on the run and in the Great Dismal Swamp maroon communities they worked to build and protect, fugitive women were not only the concealed co-conspirators of flight and avoidance, but, like men, they were also strategists who weighed the advantages of violent self-defense.