Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood

by Coryell, Janet L.; Appleton, Thomas H.; Sims, Anastatia; Treadway, Sandra Gioia

• ISBN13: 9780826212955
• ISBN10: 0826212956
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr

Summary

In a time when most Americans never questioned the premise that women should be subordinate to men, and in a place where only white men enjoyed fully the rights and privileges of citizenship, many women learned how to negotiate societal boundaries and to claim a share of power for themselves in a male-dominated world. Covering the early nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries,Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhooddescribes the ways southern women found to advance their development and independence and establish their own identities in the context of a society that restricted their opportunities and personal freedom. They confronted, cooperated with, and sometimes were co-opted by existing powers: the white and African American elite whose status was determined by wealth, family name, gender, race, skin color, or combinations thereof. Some women took action against established powers and, in so doing, strengthened their own communities; some bowed to the powers and went along to get along; some became the powers, using status to ensure their prosperity as well as their survival. All chose their actions based on the time and place in which they lived. In these thought-provoking essays, the authors illustrate the complex intersections of race, class, and gender as they examine the ways in which southern women dealt with "the powers that be" and, in some instances, became those powers. Elitism, status, and class were always filtered through a prism of race and gender in the South, and women of both races played an important role in maintaining as well as challenging the hierarchies that existed.

Table of Contents

Editors' Introduction	1	(6)
``The Extent of the Law''
Free Women of Color in Antebellum Memphis, Tennessee	7	(20)
Beverly Greene Bond
``Our Convent''
The Oblate Sisters of Providence and Baltimore's Antebellum Black Community	27	(21)
Diane Batts Morrow
``Her Just Dues''
Civil War Pensions of African American Women in Virginia	48	(23)
Michelle A. Krowl
Virginia Women as Public Citizens
Emancipation Day Celebrations and Lost Cause Commemorations, 1863--1890	71	(18)
Antoinette G. van Zelm
Married Women's Property Rights and the Challenge to the Patriarchal Order
Colorado County, Texas	89	(21)
Angela Boswell
Indispensable Spinsters
Maiden Aunts in the Elite Families of Savannah and Charleston	110	(25)
Christine Jacobson Carter
``The Strongest Ties That Bind Poor Mortals Together''
Slaveholding Windows and Family in the Old Southeast	135	(23)
Kirsten E. Wood
The Elite African American Women of Orangeburg, South Carolina
Class, Work, and Disunity	158	(16)
Kibibi Voloria Mack-Shelton
Lost Cause Mythology in New South Reform
Gender, Class, Race, and the Politics of Patriotic Citizenship in Georgia, 1890--1925	174	(25)
Rebecca Montgomery
Catridge Makers and Myrmidon Viragos
White Working-Class Women in Confederate Richmond	199	(16)
E. Susan Barber
``Their Desire to Visit the Southerners''
Mary Greenhow Lee's Visiting ``Connexion''	215	(20)
Sheila Rae Phipps
About the Authors and the Editors	235	(4)
Index	239