The following educational document corresponds with Unit Seven: Gender and the Politics of Freedom in the After Slavery exhibition. Note the "Questions to Consider" section included at the end of each document.
As the realities of the free-labor system shifted the terrain under black women's feet, many responded by turning to their nearest kin for support. In doing so, they called into being new understandings among former slaves about what it meant to be a good husband, a good wife, and a good child. We find evidence of these new gender ideals and expectations in the emergence of family-based labor contracts, particularly those brokered by black men (see below, Document 5). We find evidence in single mothers' heavy reliance on the earning power of older children, a dependency that sparked often violent child custody battles in the early years of freedom. We also find evidence in the charges aggrieved wives brought against philandering husbands. As Chloe Gay made clear to the Freedmen's Bureau agent at Wilmington, North Carolina, abandonment was a deadly serious business, one that threatened women and children's very survival.
A Freedwoman's Civil and Domestic Expectations
Decr 13th 
Lieutenant A Freedwoman named Chloe Gay, who was sent from this City with her children, at Government expense to join her husband at Jackson Northampton County: writes me, that her husband has taken up with another woman, and refuses to support her, and that he is trying by threats to force her to leave Jackson and return to this City. If Northhampton County is included in your District, will you please see what can be done for the woman. If not in your District will you please refer to the officer in charge of said County.
[signed] Allan Rutherford
Source: Lieut. Allan Rutherford to Lieut. John M. Foote, Dec. 13, , M1909 (Records of the Field Offices for the State of North Carolina, 1865-1872), RG 105: Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands
Questions to Consider