After the war, former slave women and men assumed they would have more autonomy over their working lives. For freedwomen, the fight for more control over their labor took on an additional urgency because they wanted and needed more time for their families. While the 1870 census does not indicate relationships of family members, most households had an adult male. Both the pension and Freedmen's Bureau records indicate the roles that men and women played within families. In describing their domestic relations with their men, freedwomen applying for pensions demonstrate a clear gendered division of labor in the household.
Women discuss cooking, washing, and mending clothes.
According to testimony in the pension records and the Freedmen Bureau sources, men obtained the main responsibility to provide for and protect their families. Freedmen almost always represented their families to the Freedmen's Bureau when the family brought a complaint to a bureau agent. Purchases from the plantation store documented by accounts in the Freedman's Bureau reflected the differences in women's and men's division of labor, functions within the family, and style of dress. On the Oakwood plantation near Vicksburg in January 1868, most men and women kept separate tallies. Men's accounts included pants, caps, shirts, boots, shot, fishing line, powder, hooks, and buckets.