Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South
Author: Marie S. Molloy
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611178711

A broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in the slaveholding South Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South investigates the lives of unmarried white women—from the pre- to the post-Civil War South—within a society that placed high value on women's marriage and motherhood. Marie S. Molloy examines female singleness to incorporate non-marriage, widowhood, separation, and divorce. These single women were not subject to the laws and customs of coverture, in which females were covered or subject to the governance of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and therefore lived with greater autonomy than married women. Molloy contends that the Civil War proved a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes for these women. Being a single woman during this time often meant living a nuanced life, operating within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions while manipulating them to greater advantage. Singleness was often a route to autonomy and independence that over time expanded and reshaped traditional ideals of southern womanhood. Molloy delves into these themes and their effects through the lens of the various facets of the female life: femininity, family, work, friendship, law, and property. By examining letters and diaries of more than three hundred white, native-born, southern women, Molloy creates a broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in both the urban and plantation slaveholding South. She concludes that these women were, in various ways, pioneers and participants of a slow, but definite process of change in the antebellum era.

They Were Her Property

They Were Her Property
Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245106

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History: a bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

Liberty, a Better Husband

Liberty, a Better Husband
Author: Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1984
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300039221

“For liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”—Louisa May Alcott This sensitive account focuses on the women who chose to remain single in antebellum America. Based on a study of the lives and writings of over one hundred Northeastern women, it describes the reasons why the rejected marriage and the joys and frustrations they encountered in adhering to the tenets of the cult of “Single Blessedness.” Lee Chambers-Schiller sketches the historical forces that allowed middle- and upper-class daughters to leave home in search of personal and economic independence, and she portrays the constrictions of married life from which these women fled. Single women found their own families to be sources of both pain and pleasure, for no matter what their age or position in the world, unmarried females remained daughters with dependent status, their lives continually shaped by the conflicting pulls of work and family. Yet these families—especially sister relationships—provided many of these women with love and intimacy. In fact, an extraordinary number of single sisters pursued join careers: the Weston sisters were activists in abolitionist causes; Emily and Elizabeth Blackwell both practiced medicine; Alice and Phoebe Cary became writers. By demonstrating how these women asserted themselves as individuals, Chambers-Schiller presents them as among the first to articulate the value of female autonomy and as pioneers in expanding the boundaries of women’s progress toward equality.

Out of the House of Bondage

Out of the House of Bondage
Author: Thavolia Glymph
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 571
Release: 2008-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107394279

The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

They Were Her Property

They Were Her Property
Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300251831

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Compelling.”—Renee Graham, Boston Globe “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War

Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War
Author: Kristen Brill
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2021-05-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 131742526X

Elite Confederate Women in the American Civil War is a wide-ranging primary source collection that offers a compelling selection of upper-class, white Confederate women’s voices from archives across the South. From the prison diary of Mary Terry to Elizabeth Baker Crozier’s eyewitness account of the siege of Knoxville, this volume introduces lesser-known voices of the war to show the interconnections between the home front and the front lines, and how the war shaped the lives of women and households across the South. This collection challenges students to engage with the role of first-person narratives in history and to reconsider the roles of southern women in the Civil War. Exploring the themes of slavery, nationalism, secession and occupation, these narratives offer new ways to think about traditional issues in Civil War history and, more broadly, show the ways in which studies of women and gender can enrich studies of cultures of war. This book is designed for undergraduate and graduate students of both the American Civil War and women’s history.

Rethinking Rufus

Rethinking Rufus
Author: Thomas A. Foster
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2019-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0820355224

Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus-who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated-historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.

The Plantation Mistress

The Plantation Mistress
Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Pantheon
Total Pages: 353
Release: 1984-02-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 0394722531

This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.

Backcountry Slave Trader

Backcountry Slave Trader
Author: Philip Noel Racine
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498590837

Backcountry Slave Trader explores the life of William James Smith, a South Carolina backcountry slave trader, whose entries in his business ledger and his correspondence were of unusual specificity. The authors’ analyze these entries and his correspondence, which they argue provide details about the institutional features of the domestic slave trade not found in earlier published works. The authors examine the attitude of Smith and how he conducted his business, and reveal that the interior slave trade and the characterization of the slave trader are more nuanced than previously thought.

The Overseers of Early American Slavery

The Overseers of Early American Slavery
Author: Laura R. Sandy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2020-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000048969

Enmeshed in the exploitative world of racial slavery, overseers were central figures in the management of early American plantation enterprises. All too frequently dismissed as brutal and incompetent, they defy easy categorisation. Some were rogues, yet others were highly skilled professionals, farmers, and artisans. Some were themselves enslaved. They and their wives, with whom they often formed supervisory partnerships, were caught between disdainful planters and defiant enslaved labourers, as they sought to advance their ambitions. Their history, revealed here in unprecedented detail, illuminates the complex power struggles and interplay of class and race in a volatile slave society.