Women in Antebellum America

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.)

"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

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.

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.

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.

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.