READING SELECTIONS:
Women in Slavery
Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life. (Basic Civitas, 2005) 432 pp.
“The authorship of the slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) was enigmatic, although the text was widely read, until Yellin’s research in the late 1970s conclusively named Harriet Jacobs the author. Yellin’s recent research has involved investigating Jacobs’ life. The product of her research, this selection, is a meticulously researched and fluidly narrated biography of the woman who both lived and wrote Incidents. More than simply drawing connections between true circumstances in Jacobs’ life and the events in Incidents, this biography stands on its own as the story of an oppressed slave turned engaged citizen, and especially as an account of Jacobs’ impressive achievements as a free person after the Civil War: running a boardinghouse, becoming politically and socially active, traveling, having a family. It also doubles as a contribution to nineteenth-century gender history. Yellin’s 20 years of research have clearly paid off…”
Working Class Women
Victoria Byerly, Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South. (ILR Press, 1986) 240 pp.
Byerly, who once worked in a cotton mill, has interviewed 20 women in various cotton-mill towns of North Carolina, including Crystal Lee Sutton, the union organizer on whose life the movie Norma Rae was based. In rich and fascinating detail, these women discuss their struggles raising families in poverty, their grueling work in the mills under hazardous conditions, and their frustration at receiving low payfar lower than that of their male colleagues. The womenboth black and whitetell of the uneasy state of race relations in the workplace, especially after black workers broke the color barrier in the mills in the early 1960s. Many of the women also recount their fight to improve working conditions and wages, and to gain compensation for brown-lung disease and injuries sustained on the job. This book provides both scholars and general readers with an educational, intimate and powerful record of the experiences ofthese working-class women.
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present. (Basic Books, 2009 2nd ed. [1985, 1st]) 480 pp.
The forces that shaped the institution of slavery in the American South endured, albeit in altered form, long after slavery was abolished. Toiling in sweltering Virginia tobacco factories or in the kitchens of white families in Chicago, black women felt a stultifying combination of racial discrimination and sexual prejudice. And yet, in their efforts to sustain family ties, they shared a common purpose with wives and mothers of all classes.
In Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, historian Jacqueline Jones offers a powerful account of the changing role of black women, lending a voice to an unsung struggle from the depths of slavery to the ongoing fight for civil rights.
Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. (UNC Press, 2010) 304 pp.
As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary tasks they performed in white employers’ homes, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture. In the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives. As employment opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions. Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, this book evokes African American women’s voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home.
“The Southern Lady”
Ann Blackman, Wild Rose: The True Story of a Civil War Spy. (Random House, 2006) 416 pp.
A grand dame of antebellum Washington, Rose O’Neale Greenhow was a Confederate spy. In jail, her stout defense of the South made her a Lost Cause heroine, and her celebrity, on a par with that of Elizabeth Van Lew (the subject of Southern Lady, Yankee Spy, by Elizabeth Varon, 2003), ranks highest in the annals of Civil War espionage. Doing justice to this remarkable woman, author Blackman perceptively re-creates Greenhow’s social and political milieu. From a slaveholding Maryland family, the beautiful Greenhow made an advantageous match to a State Department official and eventually became a vivid, sensual presence in the capital’s social scene, popular with powerful men such as John Calhoun and James Buchanan. Greenhow’s striking personality–confident, snobbish, and canny–is astutely portrayed amid an active narrative of her life, which ended in an 1864 shipwreck on her return from a European diplomatic mission as Jefferson Davis’ emissary. Civil War readers will become engrossed in Blackman’s able portrait, which summons the zeitgeist of the entire era through one woman’s adventurous life. (From Booklist)
Richard N. Cote, Mary’s World: Love, War and Family Ties in Nineteenth Century Charleston. (Corinthian Books, 2000) 480 pp.
Mary Pringle’s letters, journals, and account books show her as a woman resolutely determined to meet her responsibilities in a world where the veneer of a life of ease often masked deep fissures. As Victorian and Southern culture insisted, Mary was expected to fill many roles: * A charming, dutiful, and fertile companion to her husband;
* A nurturing and instructive mother to her thirteen children;
* A practical manager of the Miles Brewton House, the opulent Palladian mansion in which she lived;
* A responsible mistress of her thirty-two house slaves;
* A benevolent patron of the poor and pillar of her church; and
* An indestructible vessel which preserved and passed on her ancestors’ knowledge, traditions, values, beliefs, and property.
Yet just below the surface of her culturally ordained skin lay a woman powerless to control major areas of her own life:
* Born into a family wealthy for generations, and despite her own inherited wealth, she watched helplessly as her husband ran their family into financial ruin.
* The wife of a major Southern slaveowner, she became convinced that slaveholding was morally indefensible and was in conflict with Biblical teachings.
* A woman of great intelligence and learning, she was forced to live out her dreams vicariously through her sons, while she watched her daughters become imprisoned by the same rules which prevented her from achieving her own potential.
Mary Pringle was a vibrant woman torn between her own needs and aspirations and the limitations imposed upon her by Southern Victorian society. Mary’s World is an intimate, visceral window into the heart and mind of a well-intentioned woman whose entire world and value system was ground to dust by the grist mill of historic change.
General
Laura F. Edwards, Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era. (University of Illinois Press, 2004) 288 pp.
“Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” is a dramatic history of the South in the years leading up to and following the Civil War: a history that focuses on the women, black and white, rich and poor, who made up the fabric of southern life before the war and remade themselves and their world after it. Positing the household as the central institution of southern society, Edwards delineates the inseparable links between domestic relations and civil and political rights in ways that highlight women’s active political role throughout the nineteenth century. She draws on diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, government records, legal documents, court proceedings, and other primary sources to explore the experiences and actions of individual women in the changing South, demonstrating how family, kin, personal reputation, and social context all merged with gender, race, and class to shape what particular women could do in particular circumstances. Meet Harriet Jacobs, the escaped slave who hid in a tiny, unheated attic on her master’s property for seven years until she could free her children and herself. Marion Singleton Deveaux Converse, the southern belle who leaped out a second-story window to escape her second husband’s ‘discipline’ and received temporary shelter from her slaves. Sarah Guttery, a white, poor, unwed mother of two, whose hard work and clean living earned her community’s respect despite her youthful transgressions. Aunt Lucy, who led her fellow slaves in taking over her master’s abandoned plantation and declared herself the new mistress. Through vivid portraits of these and other slaves, free blacks, common whites, and the white elite, Edwards shows how women’s domestic situations determined their lives before the war and their responses to secession and armed conflict. She also documents how women of various classes entered into the process of rebuilding, asserting new rights and exploring new roles after the war. An ideal basic text on society in the Civil War era, “Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” demonstrates how women on every step of the social ladder worked actively throughout the period to shape southern society in ways that fulfilled their hopes for the future. They used the resources at their disposal to fashion their own positive identities, to create the social bonds that sustained them in difficult times, and to express powerful social critiques that helped them make sense of their lives.
Cynthia A. Kiemer, Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835. (Cornell University Press, 1998) 304 pp.
Cynthia A. Kierner debunks the myth of the delicate flower of Southern womanhood in Beyond the Household: Women’s Place in the Early South, 1700-1835. From the earliest settlements onward, Southern women worked hard and long to provide the underpinnings of life in a new land. Examining the influence of slavery, religion and the dominance of the ideals of republican politics and of gentility, Kierner shows how these women were kept in their place for more than a hundred years. 22 b&w photos.
The Legal Position of Women
Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America. (UNC Press, 1989) 285 pp.
In this first comprehensive study of women’s property rights in early America, Marylynn Salmon discusses the effect of formal rules of law on women’s lives. By focusing on such areas such as conveyancing, contracts, divorce, separate estates, and widows’ provisions, Salmon presents a full picture of women’s legal rights from 1750 to 1830.
Salmon shows that the law assumes women would remain dependent and subservient after marriage. She documents the legal rights of women prior to the Revolution and traces a gradual but steady extension of the ability of wives to own and control property during the decades following the Revolution. The forces of change in colonial and early national law were various, but Salmon believes ideological considerations were just as important as economic ones.
Women did not all fare equally under the law. In this illuminating survey of the jurisdictions of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, Salmon shows regional variations in the law that affected women’s autonomous control over property. She demonstrates the importance of understanding the effects of formal law on women’ s lives in order to analyze the wider social context of women’s experience.
Peter W. Bardaglio, Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex and the Law in the Nineteenth Century South. (UNC Press, 1998) 384 pp.
In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio’s analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order.
Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.
