Beastly Incest: Freedwomen, the Freedmans Bureau and Paternity in the Post-Emancipation South

Alexis Broderick Neumann’s paper will examine a series of cases in which freedwomen brought complaints to the Freedman’s Bureau demanding child support from their former masters who had raped them and fathered their children. Positing that the paternalism, sexual violence, and explosive domestic intimacies of slavery should be understood as incestuous, this paper argue not only that slavery was incestuous at a systemic level, but also that freedwomen themselves, in their own words and actions, exposed this sexual exploitation.