Read complete books and articles on: Women in Antebellum America

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: Women in Antebellum America

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

We Mean to Be Counted: White Women & Politics in Antebellum Virginia » Read Now
by Elizabeth R. Varon. 236 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...counted: white women and politics in antebellum Virginia...Gender American culture...Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia," Journal of American...
2.

Ladies, Women & Wenches: Choice & Constraint in Antebellum Charleston & Boston » Read Now
by Jane H. Pease, William H. Pease. 218 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...Gender American Culture...Ladies, Women, Wenches...Constraint in Antebellum Charleston...Ladies, women, and wenches...constraint in antebellum Charleston...Gender American...
3.

Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South » Read Now
by Victoria E. Bynum. 238 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...stereotype of the antebellum South as a...majority of white women in North Carolina...of African American women were...the women of antebellum North Carolina...status of...
4.

Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South » Read Now
by Susanna Delfino, Michele Gillespie. 324 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Although historians over the past two decades have written extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they have largely neglected the world of the working woman. "Neither Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labors of ordinary...
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Although historians over the past two decades have written extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they have largely neglected the world of the working woman. "Neither Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labors of ordinary southern women--white, free black, and Indian.
Contributors to this volume illuminate women's involvement in the southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays explore the working lives of a wide range of women--nuns and prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic servants--in urban and rural settings across the South. By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially acknowledged and "invisible" work within the context of cultural attitudes regarding women's proper place in society, the book sheds new light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race, class, and gender in the modernizing South.
Contributors
E. Susan Barber, College of Notre Dame of Maryland (Baltimore, Md.)
Bess Beatty, Oregon State University (Eugene, Ore.)
Emily Bingham (Louisville, Ky.)
James Taylor Carson, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
Emily Clark, University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg, Miss.)
Stephanie Cole, University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington, Tex.)
Susanna Delfino, University of Genoa (Genoa, Italy)
Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
Sarah Hill (Atlanta, Ga.)
Barbara J. Howe, West Virginia University (Morgantown, W. Va.)
Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick (Coventry, England)
Stephanie McCurry, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
Diane BattsMorrow, University of Georgia (Athens, Ga.)
Penny L. Richards, UCLA Center for the Study of Women (Los Angeles, Calif.)
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5.

African American Women and the Vote, 1837-1965 ("Architects of a Vision: Black Women and Their Antebellum Quest for Political and Social Equality" begins on p. 24) » Read Now
by Bettye Collier-Thomas, Ann D. Gordon. 217 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

"An exciting and pathbreaking collection containing many exceptionally well-written, thought-provoking, insightful essays on a subject that has never before received this concentrated attention". -- Darlene Clark Hine
6.

The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement » Read Now
by Julie Roy Jeffrey. 311 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

This is an exploration of the involvement of ordinary black and white women in the antislavery movement. Drawing on a variety of sources, Jeffrey uses the words of real women to illuminate the meaning of abolition in their lives.
7.

The Female Seminary Movement and Woman's Mission in Antebellum America, in Church History » Read Now
by Leonard I. Sweet. 15 pgs.

Collections: Religious Studies, Entire Library

...of educating American women which would have...ramifications in antebellum America. In the...examination of antebellum Americas social and economic...agencies" where women...
8.

Pollution's Stain: A Fallen Woman's Quest for Redemption in Antebellum New Orleans, in The Historian » Read Now
by Erin Kennedy Pelger. 17 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

...South in the American Civil War...and White Women in the Old South...Identity in the Antebellum South," 19...Literature of American Women from 1794...Survival in...
9.

"I Am as a Bell that Cannot Ring": Antebellum Women Oratory, in Women and Language » Read Now
by Anne Mattina. 6 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...cannot ring": antebellum women oratory...position in American history grows...scrutiny is antebellum rhetoric...Oratory" in American history...focused on women in the...
10.

Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South » Read Now
by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. 548 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

This important book challenges many current notions about antebellum southern women, white and black. Bound in a web of intimacy fraught with violence, the lives of slave women were intertwined, but they were never linked in sisterhood. Although mistresses and slaves shared a common household, they...
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This important book challenges many current notions about antebellum southern women, white and black. Bound in a web of intimacy fraught with violence, the lives of slave women were intertwined, but they were never linked in sisterhood. Although mistresses and slaves shared a common household, they were radically different from each other, and Within the Plantation Household documents the difficult class relations between slaveholding and slave women.
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11.

Searching for Their Places: Women in the South across Four Centuries » Read Now
by Thomas H. Appleton Jr., Angela Boswell. 296 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Searching for Their Places is a collection inspired by the Fifth Southern Conference on Women's History. The esays in this volume are particularly astute in assessing the ways in which southern women have claimed power, or "searched for their places, " and suggests how southern women, individually...
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Searching for Their Places is a collection inspired by the Fifth Southern Conference on Women's History. The esays in this volume are particularly astute in assessing the ways in which southern women have claimed power, or "searched for their places, " and suggests how southern women, individually and collectively, have sought to empower themselves. The essays, written by outstanding historians in this field, represent some of the freshest and most exciting scholarship about women in the South. They convincingly illustrate how the national experience looks different when southern women become the focus. The essayists use extensive analyses of primary source materials to examine a variety of issues that have confronted women in the South from the days of English colonialization through the civil rights struggles of the post-World War II era. The collection is well balanced in its periodization, with four essays on the antebellum years, one on the Civil War, three on the immediate postbellum era, and four based in the twentieth century. Studying women of every color, background, and station across the region and across four centuries, Searching for Their Places will appeal to the general reader and anyone interested in women's studies.
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12.

The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 » Read Now
by Suzanne Lebsock. 326 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

...of them women. More important...small scale in the late...century. In the antebellum decades...census ranked American cities according...discussed later, in the antebellum...
13.

Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States » Read Now
by Lora Romero. 150 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...Novel in America 1 Feminist...assumption that women writers were...the canon. In the construction of the antebellum canon, however...and 1860 America was flooded...mainly...
14.

In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature » Read Now
by Susan J. Tracy. 310 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of...
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This book explores the way in which literature can be used to reinforce social power. Through rigorous readings of a series of antebellum plantation novels, Susan J. Tracy shows how the narrative strategies employed by proslavery Southern writers served to justify and perpetuate the oppression of women, blacks, and poor whites. Tracy focuses on the historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Using variations on a recurring plot - in which a young planter/hero rescues a planter's daughter from an "enemy" of her class - each of these novelists reinforced an idealized vision of a Southern civilization based on male superiority, white supremacy, and class inequality. It is a world in which white men are represented as the natural leaders of loyal and dependent women, grateful and docile slaves, and inferior poor whites. According to Tracy, the interweaving of these themes reveals the extent to which the Southern defense of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War was an argument not only about race relations but about gender and class relations as well.
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