Southern Women Black and White in the Old South

by McMillen, Sally G.

• ISBN13: 9780882959634
• ISBN10: 0882959638
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-10-16
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

McMillen summarises the latest thinking about the lives of women in the South, both white and black, elite and ordinary. One of the best features of the book is the author's ability to weave the lives of all these women together in the same chapters. The excellent introduction is followed by four chapters on Family Life and Marriage, Reproduction and Childrearing, Social Concerns: Education and Religion, and Women at Work. McMillen points out that many myths still surround antebellum Southern women. They were much more complicated people than the women portrayed in many novels and histories. Of course, they cannot be lumped into one group as they differed according to time, region, race, and class, but all were influenced by living in a rural, agricultural, slave society. In this society women were supposed to be submissive and hardworking and devoted to the family and home; each person had a place and women were supposed to know theirs.

Author Biography

Sally G. McMillen is Professor of history at Davidson College, where she has taught since 1988. She is also the author of Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (1990), To Raise Up the South: Sunday Schools in Black and White Churches, 1865—1915 (2002) as well as several journal articles. She is co-editor of Major Problems in the History of the American South (1999).

Born and raised in southern California, she is the mother of two grown children. Her personal interests include running, hiking, biking, reading, and traveling.

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: An Overview of the South and Southern Women	1	(12)
Family Life and Marriage	13	(44)
Family	13	(4)
Courtship and Marriage	17	(8)
Miscegenation and Sexuality	25	(9)
Marriage	34	(3)
Black Women and Marriage	37	(4)
White Women and Marriage	41	(7)
Laws and Marriage	48	(9)
Reproduction and Childrearing	57	(33)
Fertility	57	(5)
Pregnancy	62	(4)
Childbearing	66	(8)
Motherhood and Childrearing	74	(16)
Social Concerns: Education and Religion	90	(28)
Education	90	(5)
The School Experience	95	(6)
Education for the Less Privileged	101	(3)
White Women and Religion	104	(7)
Women's Benevolence	111	(3)
Black Women and Religion	114	(4)
Women and Work	118	(36)
The Meaning of Southern Women's Work	118	(2)
Slave Labor	120	(6)
Slave Protest	126	(2)
White Women and Work	128	(4)
Work on the Frontier	132	(3)
Paid Employment	135	(5)
Nontraditional Roles	140	(4)
Interracial and Class Relationships	144	(7)
Those Who Questioned Slavery	151	(3)
Southern Women and the Confederacy	154	(33)
Elite White Women	155	(17)
Slave and Free Black Women	172	(4)
Yeoman and Poor Farmwives	176	(4)
Coping Skills and Union Supporters	180	(2)
End of War	182	(1)
Conclusion	183	(4)
Bibliographical Essay	187	(22)
Index	209