Making Private Spaces through Public Means: Black Women and the Crusade Against the One-Room Cabin

Privacy – one of the core rights of United States citizens – had long been denied to black Americans by the end of the nineteenth century. Slaveholders in the antebellum era created a racialized ideology of private domestic space that labeled African American dwellings as public domestic spaces, an ideology appropriated by a range of white southerners after emancipation to justify brutal attacks against black homes and bodies. Using popular print outlets, black female activists determined to change the undesirable image of black homes. Black women executed this campaign through widely read black periodicals that incorporated images alongside text, focusing their efforts specifically against one domestic form prevalent in the rural South: the one-room cabin. They claimed that the overcrowding and lack of privacy in these spaces bred immorality and criminality, but black female activists used this politics of respectability for a more revolutionary purpose. These characteristics (of overcrowding, immorality, criminality) had been similarly used to describe slave dwellings, allowing white supremacists to use contemporary one-room cabins as evidence that black Americans had not progressed passed slavery. Eradicating the one-room cabin would therefore not just provide black Americans with “better” living spaces; it would prove that black Americans deserved the rights of privacy and homelife. Additionally, creating private homes supported black women’s claims to womanhood and suffrage. Black female activists used the politics of the home to increase their political participation in the public sphere, all while seeking to make good on emancipation’s promise of free, safe, secure homes.