Chapter One

Southern Women, Southern Households

Our whole fabric of society is based on slave institutions, and yet our conventional language is drawn from scenes totally at variance with those which lie about us.

--Frederick Porcher

Now it is the genius of slavery to make the family the slave's commonwealth. The master is his magistrate and legislator.... He is a member of a municipal society only through his master, who represents him.... The integers of which the commonwealth aggregate is made up, are ... single families, authoritatively represented in the father and master.

And this is the fundamental difference between the theory of the Bible, and that of radical democracy.

--Robert L. Dabney

The temptation is strong to write the history of southern women from the discrete stories of Sarah Gayle and of the thousands who were both very much like her and, simultaneously, very much like no other women. Women's diaries, journals, and correspondence reveal much of the fabric of their lives--especially their personal perceptions--and much about the dynamics of antebellum southern society. Yet southern women's history consists in something more than the sum of these stories. First, this subjective evidence reveals only part of the story, for it disproportionately favors the literate and introspective over the illiterate and circumspect, favors white women over black women, favors slaveholding women over yeoman and poor white women. Second, the value of any subjective evidence depends upon the questions put to it--depends heavily upon our assumptions about the nature of the society to which southern women belonged. To understand the subjective evidence, we must locate it within the specific context of southern society, must identify not merely what southern women shared with other women across time and space, but what they shared with the men of their class and race and what differentiated them from other women.

Antebellum southern women, like all others, lived in a discrete social system and political economy within which gender, class, and race relations shaped their lives and identities. Thus, even a preliminary sketch of the history of southern women must attend scrupulously both to their immediate conditions and to the larger social system in which the immediate conditions were embedded and by which they were informed. We have, in a sense, two views: the view from within and the view from without--the view of the participants and the view of the historians. Women do not normally experience their lives as manifestations of the laws of political economy, although they may register sharply the vicissitudes of economic fortunes. The papers of southern women are accounts of troubles with servants and children, of struggles for faith, of friendships, and of turning hems. These intimate personal details and perceptions constitute a valuable record in themselves and suggest patterns of a larger social experience. We inevitably abstract from historical evidence in order to construct a narrative or an analysis. The most significant differences among historians occur at this stage of abstraction, which itself influences the ways in which we interpret and organize the specific evidence. Southern history abounds in these debates, which afford some of the most lively and theoretically informed writing in American history. But the debates have not yet taken adequate account of the history of southern women. Nor has the experience of southern women significantly penetrated the "larger" debates, which badly need closer attention to gender.

Southern women belonged to a slave society that differed decisively from the northern bourgeois society to which it was politically bound. Slavery as a social system shaped the experience of all its women, for slavery influenced the nature of the whole society, not least its persisting rural character. Southern slave society consisted largely of a network of households that contained within themselves the decisive relations of production and reproduction. In the South, in contrast to the North, the household retained a vigor that permitted southerners to ascribe many matters--notably labor relations, but also important aspects of gender relations--to the private sphere, whereas northerners would increasingly ascribe them to the public spheres of market and state. The household structure and social relations of southern society had multiple and far-reaching consequences for all spheres of southern life, including law, political economy, politics, and slaveholders' relations with yeomen and other nonslaveholding whites. And it had special consequences for gender relations in general and women's experience in particular.

The persistence in the South of the household as the dominant unit of production and reproduction guaranteed the power of men in society, even as measured by nineteenth-century bourgeois standards. During the period in which northern society was undergoing a reconversion of household into home and ideologically ascribing it to the female sphere, southern society was reinforcing the centrality of plantation and farm households that provided continuities and discontinuities in the experience of women of different classes and races. Variations in the wealth of households significantly differentiated women's experience, but the common structure as a unit of production and reproduction under men's dominance provided some basic similarity. Effectively, the practical and ideological importance of the household in southern society reinforced gender constraints by ascribing all women to the domination of the male heads of households and to the company of the women of their own households. In 1853 Mary Kendall, a transplanted New Englander, wrote to her sister of her special pleasure in receiving a letter from her, for "I seldom see any person aside from our own family, and those employed upon the plantation. For about three weeks I did not have the pleasure of seeing one white female face , there being no white family except our own upon the plantation." The experience of black slave women differed radically from that of all white women, for they belonged to households that were not governed by their own husbands, brothers, and fathers. But even black slave women shared with white women of different social classes some of the constraints of prevalent gender conventions.

As members of a slave society, southern women differed in essential respects from other American women, although their experience has not figured prominently in the development of American women's history, much less influenced the theory that informs generalizations about the experience of American women. Southern women's history should force us to think seriously about the relation between the experiences that unite women as members of a gender and those that divide them as members of specific communities, classes, and races. It should, in other words, challenge us to recognize class and race as central, rather than incidental, to women's identities and behavior--to their sense of themselves as women.

American women's history, notwithstanding its success in challenging the dominant interpretations of gender, has followed the road of the great American consensus with respect to race and class. Historians of the "American woman" have charted "her" experience and traced her blossoming consciousness from the farms and towns of New England through the abolitionist and women's rights movements of that New England diaspora traced by Frederick Jackson Turner, to the Sanitary Commission, the Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement, and access to higher education. From there, the modal history has progressed to the emergence of professional careers in social work or related occupations; growing participation in government through the Consumers' League, the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor, and the activities of the New Deal; and on to the National Organization for Women (NOW), the vice-presidential candidacy of Geraldine Ferraro, and the fight for women's right to abortion.

The tendency to generalize the experience of the women of one region to cover that of all American women has obscured essential differences of class and race. The generalization might be defended if it could be shown that structural similarities transcended regional variations, which could then appropriately be dismissed as little more than accidents of local color. But "New Englandization" cannot be reduced to local color, for the original New England model derives directly from dominant American attitudes toward class relations in history, and beyond them toward the prevailing mythology of who Americans are as a people.

The New England women whose experience has provided the dominant models for women's history belonged overwhelmingly to the emerging bourgeoisie. To be sure, industrial capitalism developed slowly and unevenly in New England as elsewhere; nonetheless, the market governed the development of social and gender relations even among people whose lives it touched indirectly. Some women's historians, notably Christine Stansell and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, have challenged the simplicity of the New England model by insisting on the variations in women's experience by class. Stansell, for example, cogently argues that during the antebellum period the working-class women of New York City, who were less than impressed by the purported sisterliness of upper- and middle-class women, developed a distinct subculture, including particular attitudes toward work, family, sexuality, and self-presentation. And Smith-Rosenberg develops a welcome picture of women's special roles in an emerging bourgeois culture. Despite these promising new directions, we still lack a revised picture of the complex roles of different groups of women in the development of American life and political culture, much less a reassessment of the roles and values of southern women.

Smith-Rosenberg's evocation of bourgeois culture, like Stansell's insistence on class conflict among women, should begin to move us beyond the uncritical acceptance of the cultural and political predominance of the fabled middle classes. Yet ultimately, we must also explain the persistence of that predominance and its abiding sway over our vision of our own identity as a people, for Americans have clung tenaciously to the view of themselves as a democratic, middle-class society. The very term middle class derives from a literature that sought to describe social stratification as an analytical alternative to class relations. Many southern women, like women throughout the country, can be said to have been "middle-class," broadly construed, but to have belonged to the middle class in a society in which some people owned others carried fateful consequences. To be a "middle-class" employer of free labor or of no labor at all was one thing. To be a "middle-class" owner of human flesh was--materially, ideologically, psychologically--quite another. Most societies, most systems of social relations, have a large middle, if only because most sociological analyses structure data in a manner that guarantees it. The question remains: Middle of what?

The model of womanhood that emerged in the northeastern part of the country rested upon a view of class relations that sought to deny the significance of class divisions--that sought to promote the illusion that all men were truly equal. This view claimed to embody universal rather than specifically middle-class values and, in the name of universalism, sought to impose middle-class values on the rest of the nation. That attempt, which began with evangelicalism, nativism, and an emphasis on the work ethic, ended with antislavery, the Republican party, and the war for the Union. Any attempt to apply such a model to women who--whatever else may be said about them--ended up on the other side of that confrontation requires some fancy footwork. Yet most historians who have considered the history of southern women at all have absorbed large doses of that model, even if they have also protested against simple assimilation of the experience of southern women with that of their northern "sisters."

Joan Jensen has argued that the northeastern model of separate spheres does not adequately explain the experience of the small group of mid-Atlantic farm women whom she has carefully studied. For these women, the initial impact of capitalism resulted in a refiguration of their work within farm households, and only gradually in a loosening of the bonds that tied them to those households. Their religious convictions as Hicksite Quakers and their special experiences gradually led a small fraction of the wealthiest among them to espouse the cause of women's rights. But by that time they had reason to view their destinies as, in essential respects, separate from those of their household kin. Jensen's work offers a microcosm of the possible variations within the experience of different groups of women throughout the mid-Atlantic states and possibly the midwestern ones as well. But it also confirms that the logic of northern development, broadly interpreted, led toward women's growing engagement with the market, first as members of households and gradually as individuals. The development of southern slave society did not promote the same result. In this respect the experience of northern women, despite innumerable variations according to subregion and class, differed fundamentally from that of southern women, black and white. The history of southern women does not constitute another regional variation on the main story; it constitutes another story.

Women's history, in part as a natural attempt to establish its own claims, has tended to emphasize what women shared across class and racial lines. It has, in short, tended toward an essentialist interpretation of women's experience--indeed, of women's "being." By "essentialist," I mean a transhistorical view of women that emphasizes the core biological aspects of women's identity, independent of time and place, class, nation, and race. From the perspective of many women's historians, to emphasize the class and racial determinants of women's experience and, especially, women's consciousness is to compromise the integrity of women's perception and to mute the pervasiveness of sexism and male dominance. Women's history has paid attention to the experience of women of different classes and is, increasingly if still inadequately, paying attention to the experience of women of different races. The problem is not that we have no history of working-class or black women. It is that, with notable exceptions, the histories we do have are being written as if class and race did not shape women's experience and even their identities.

Neither women's history nor women's identities can responsibly be abstracted from the social relations of class and race in the society and communities with which we are here concerned. The history of the women of the Old South illustrates what should be a general rule of women's history: The history of women cannot be written without attention to women's relations with men in general and with "their" men in particular, nor without attention to the other women of their society. If we try to work with a general, not to mention an essentialist, view of women's nature, we must end in banality. All women, like all men, are a product of social relations defined to include gender, class, nationality, and race. Their innermost identifies, their ideals for themselves, and their views of the world all derive from their sense of themselves as a woman in relation to men and other women--their sense of themselves as the female members of specific societies.

Class and race deeply divided southern women, notwithstanding their shared experience of life in rural households under the domination of men. There is almost no evidence to suggest that slaveholding women envisioned themselves as the "sisters" of yeoman women, although there may have been some blurring at the margins when kin relations crossed class lines. In contrast, there is reason to believe that some slaveholding women felt minimal kinship with their female slaves, with whom they might have intimate, if tension-fraught, relations in everyday life. In general, but for women in particular, class relations in southern society remained essentially hierarchical. If anything, relations among women of different classes strengthened and reaffirmed class distance among free white families and served as an antidote to the elements of egalitarianism--or at least formal political democracy--that characterized relations among free white men. The relations among women also reaffirmed the special race relations of slave society, for the more established slaveholding women viewed their female slaves as somehow part of their affective universe in a way that they did not view yeoman women or even arrivistes. But they unavoidably viewed those slaves as social and racial inferiors whose station in life was that of perpetual servants. Thus, the arrivistes could in time "arrive," whereas the slaves had no prospects and the nonslaveholders could be perceived as having none."

Gender, race, and class relations constituted the grid that defined southern women's objective positions in their society, constituted the elements from which they fashioned their views of themselves and their world, constituted the relations of different groups of southern women to one another. The class relations that divided and interlocked southern women played a central role in their respective identities. Slaveholding, slave, yeoman, poor white, and middle-class town women, as members of a gender, shared the imposition of male dominance, but their experience of that dominance differed significantly according to class and race.

The forms of male prejudice and dominance differ among societies that assign specific purposes and forms to prejudice and domination. The distinctive forms of male dominance in the South developed in conjunction with the development of slavery as a social system and reflected the rural character that slavery reinforced in southern society. In the South, as in many other societies, church and state substantially reinforced the prevalent forms of male dominance, some of which were national and some regionally specific. Within the South, the forms varied considerably according to community. Like religion and the law, the rural character of southern slave society impinged upon women of all classes and races in innumerable, albeit different, ways. Above all, it circumscribed their mobility and the size of the communities to which they belonged or within which they developed their sense of themselves. For most women, male dominance appeared specifically as a direct manifestation of the social and gender relations of particular communities, however much accepted as a general law of life.

Superficially, the experience of southern women paralleled that of their northern counterparts in many ways. Religious conviction lay at the heart of country women's struggle to know themselves and to apply their knowledge so as to live and die as Christian women. The language of the Bible and sermons shaped country women's models of female excellence. The church offered one of their few social encounters outside the household, as well as their most immediate court for the enforcement of social relations and behavior. Christianity as a system of belief and the church as network and institution functioned analogously for southern and northern town and country women. Jean Friedman has convincingly argued that religion contributed to, rather than alleviated, southern women's sense of living in an "enclosed garden" under the domination of men. Yet most southern women probably experienced that enclosure within their purportedly ordained station as a natural manifestation of human and divine order rather than as arbitrary imprisonment.

Southern religious values imperceptibly merged with the high culture and high politics of the slaveholders, which in turn permeated southern society. Religion, politics, and culture were rooted in and continually transformed the slaveholders' daily lives and attitudes. Women contributed to the hegemony of the slaveholding class, even though men normally figured as its premier spokesmen, and no claim to understand them can ignore those contributions. Slaveholding women, who never figured as mere passive victims of male dominance, benefited from their membership in a ruling class. Slave, yeoman, and poor white women experienced their own subordination as, in some way, legitimated by women as well as by men. Thus, the behavior and attitudes of slaveholding women in their daily lives simultaneously reflected and contributed to the ideology of the slaveholders and strengthened their cultural and political influence over society. The relations of slaveholding women with the other classes of society--notably the slaves, yeomen, and poor whites--articulated attributes of class and race as well as gender. As ladies, slaveholding women enacted the differences between social groups at least as much as they did the similarities among women. As ladies, they reinforced slaveholding ideology even as they reformulated it in feminine guise.

The slaveholders enunciated their ideology in a variety of published discourses--political, economic, religious, social, literary--but only a minority of those to whom they were directed, including women of the slaveholding class, read them. And yet broad dissemination ensured that the messages of this formal intellectual work ultimately touched the ordinary lives of slaveholding women and influenced their relations with the men and women of other classes. The private papers of slaveholding women reveal that many of them engaged with the high culture of their society through a wide variety of printed texts. Few followed Louisa McCord in her passion for political economy, but many concerned themselves with religion, literature, and history. The ways in which and the extent to which women shared in this literate culture varied considerably, but many had access through participation in the networks of institutions through which ideas were disseminated and class relations consolidated. The slaveholders, women and men, were bound together in a web of belief and behavior by schools, churches, watering places or resorts, and villages, and by lecture hails that supplemented the family gatherings around the fire, at which the head of the household read aloud the Bible or a printed sermon or some other elevating or suitable work.

The schools and churches of southern society developed on the basis of available resources and choices about whom to instruct and whom to hold in church fellowship. The choices resulted, albeit unequally, from the beliefs and goals of the members of different classes and races. Thus, if a group of black slaves sought to establish a church or a school, they would either have to do so in secrecy and under adverse circumstances, or with white support and control. Even yeomen, not to mention poor whites, did not, with their scarce resources, enjoy wide choice in such matters. Within the various classes, the choices of women always partly reflected their class's view of proper gender relations and roles, in tension with women's independent views and access to resources. Some southern women of all classes and races found access to schooling and especially to church membership. Southern women may even have outnumbered southern men in church membership, although possibly not in church attendance. The figures here remain far from conclusive, and possibly one of the significant differences between northern and southern society lay precisely in the greater proportion of men to women in southern church attendance, if not membership.

No southern woman shared equal access to schooling with the men of her own class, although by the 1850s increasing numbers of women were attending academies sponsored by the churches and the more reflective political leaders. And although slaveholders frequently expended considerable effort to provide their daughters with educations appropriate to their station, they firmly discouraged those daughters from becoming teachers. When the disruptions of the war finally made it possible for Elizabeth Grimball to take a position as a teacher, her mother, Meta Morris Grimball, reported that although "the old Mauma has acted throughout [defeat and emancipation] with perfect consideration, she was terribly mortified by Elizabeth being a teacher, & Gabriella, & Charlotte keeping a school." Teaching a Sunday-school class might be viewed as a social responsibility; teaching a favorite slave to read might even be tolerated; but earning a salary for regular teaching was viewed as an unfortunate necessity for widows or, even worse, wives who had fallen victim to their husbands' inadequacies. It was not a fit occupation for a lady.

Education underscores the difference between southern women and women throughout the rest of the country. In the late eighteenth century, northern bourgeois and, in lesser measure, southern slaveholders discovered the virtues of educating women to meet their responsibilities as republican mothers. But whereas, in the South, that elite tradition long continued to dominate prevailing attitudes toward women's education, in the North it was rapidly supplemented by a practical commitment to educating young women for careers as teachers. Because the South lagged far behind the North in the development of common schools, it did not develop the same expanding demand for low-paid, female teachers and, accordingly, did not develop institutions to train them. The South had nothing that resembled Emma Willard's academy in Troy, New York, which especially trained teachers. When circumstances forced slaveholding women to turn to teaching as a means of supporting themselves, they opened small, transitory private schools, not unlike the dame schools of late-colonial New England. In northern society, education emerged as an essential ingredient in training displaced rural children and immigrants to take their places in a capitalist economy. Young women who were marrying later, or perhaps not at all, and who were no longer essential to their parents' households, were ideal candidates for the task of basic instruction, especially since they could be paid less than men for the same work.

The figure of the lady, especially the plantation mistress, dominated southern ideals of womanhood. That slaveholding ladies were massively outnumbered by nonslaveholding or small-slaveholding women challenges any easy assumptions about the relation between the ideal and reality but does not undermine the power of the ideal. The temptation to demystify the figure of the lady has proved almost irresistible. It has even been argued that the plantation mistress closely resembled slave women in being the victim of the double burden of patriarchy and slavery. According to this view, southern ladies, isolated on plantations and condemned to bear many children, endured husbands who whored in the slave quarters and slaves who combined sauciness with sloth and indifference. It has been, if anything, more seductive to reason that ladies, who themselves suffered male domination, were the primary, if secret, critics of their society--nothing less than closet feminists and abolitionists who saw slavery as a "monstrous system." "Poor women, poor slaves," in the widely quoted words of Mary Boykin Chesnut. But most ladies, like Mary Chesnut herself, were hardly prepared to do without slaves and enthusiastically supported secession. Above all, they did not advance an alternate model of womanhood. The North, too, had its ladies and fashionable women, but northern society preferred to celebrate the virtues of domesticity over those of privilege.

This modern view of the southern woman as the leading opponent of southern institutions strikingly conforms to that espoused by northern abolitionist women, including those southern expatriates, the Grimké sisters, who loudly denounced the special toll that slavery exacted from white women: In their view, the condition of women in a slave society can only be compared to that of slaves; life in a slave society intensified both women's enslavement and their consciousness of it. These perceptions encourage the view that privileged southern women were alienated from their own society and were feminists in much the same sense as were the northern advocates of women's rights. Black slave women figure in this picture of southern women primarily as evidence of the society's sexual disarray and as burdens on already overburdened slaveholding women. Rather than living a life of ease and privilege, so this argument goes, the southern lady lived a life of ceaseless responsibility and toil, as "the slave of slaves." In truth, she did neither.

Slave women did not see their mistresses as oppressed sisters. But recent work on Afro-American slave women has--notwithstanding its generally high quality and good intentions--also paid inadequate attention to the consequences of class and racial oppression for slave women's sense of themselves as women. Similarly, historians of the slave community have minimized the consequences of enslavement for the relations between slave women and men, and, in defending the strength and vitality of Afro-American culture, have too easily assumed that the slaves developed their own strong attachment to a "normal," nuclear family life--a remarkably egalitarian form of conjugal domesticity and companionship. The skewing of this picture derived primarily from assumptions about slave men and women as couples; assumptions about the most likely foundations for the demonstrably strong attachment of slaves to their families; and assumptions about the necessary underpinnings for male strength. These assumptions were accompanied by respectful attention to slave women as workers and as members of the slave community. Indeed, most of the male historians of slavery delighted in celebrating the strength of slave women, but they also did their best to make those women fit into their own preconceptions of what a strong woman should be--a cross between middle-class domesticity and the virtuous woman of Proverbs.

The history of slave women, like that of the women of other oppressed groups, races, nations, and classes, demonstrates how dangerous it can be to study women in isolation from the interlocking systems of class, gender, and race relations that constitute any society. By modern feminist standards, slave women did escape some of the fetters of privilege that imprisoned white northern women. But surely they did not escape the larger constraints imposed by life in a slave society. Nor is there any reason to believe that they, any more than their men, escaped a heavy dose of cultural domination, even though they might appropriate, reinterpret, and turn to their own advantage those distinct elements of white culture that they could assimilate into an Afro-American culture of their own making. What can be the political and cultural moral of the story of slave women's purported independence? Did that independence materially free them from their own enslavement? From the perspective of Afro-Americans as a people, should the independence of women be interpreted as a collective gain, or merely as the confirmation of slave men's weakness relative to white men? Nothing can be gained by pretending that these complexities do not exist. Even the recognition of black women's "double" oppression and their uniquely creative solutions to the problems that confront all women cannot explain away the consequences of the enslavement of black men for black women's identities.

Gender constitutes an indispensable category of analysis because it imposes the recognition that to be a woman or a man is to participate in a set of social relations in a specific way. When white slaveholding women invoked their own sense of "honor," as many did, they were invoking an ideal of excellence that could not be divorced from their identification with their men and their reliance on their class position for a sense of who they were. The ideal of honor was related, however imprecisely, to the ability to command the bodies and labor of others, to a model of social hierarchy in which some were born and would die superior to others, whatever their personal failings and economic vicissitudes. The independence and strength of slave women were inscribed in a social system in which slaveholding women had the right to command the obedience and deference of slave men, in which s1aveholding men had the right to exploit the bodies of slave women, and in which slave men did not have the right to resist either form of assault, although they often did at the risk of their lives. Obviously, there were limits to the deference slave men could extract from slave women under these conditions. But how do we evaluate a female strength that may have derived less from African traditions than from an enslavement that stripped men of all the normal attributes of male power: legal and social fatherhood, the control of property, the ability to dominate households?

The ways in which various authors want the story to end impinges on every effort to write it. Either the power that some people exercise over others has consequences or it does not. If it does not, then the arguments for freedom and liberation lose much of their force. If it does, then those who have suffered the inescapable dependence of forcibly imposed power must face the consequences. Those who favor the essentialist view of women's history may find, in the abstraction of the effects of slavery on black men, an asset for the story they wish to tell. Others may find the perspective daunting. Stripping men of power may well encourage female autonomy, but black women, slave and free, lived in a world dominated by men, even if those men were not of their own race. Nothing can disguise the horrible economic and social consequences of slavery for black men and women, both separately and together.

Everyone agrees that slavery imposed special burdens upon women. W. E. B. Du Bois reserved his harshest indictment of the white South for the treatment suffered by black women, and feminists' like Angela Davis have similarly insisted upon the "double burden" that afflicts Afro-American women. Even slavery itself, Du Bois wrote, he could forgive, "for slavery is a world-old habit." But one thing he could "never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood to which it sought and seeks to prostitute its lust." Du Bois's moving and revealing remarks rest on an unquestioning acceptance of an ideal of womanhood and, in this respect, invite comparison with those of Sojourner Truth at the middle of the nineteenth century. For Sojourner Truth, speaking to a white, middle-class, women's rights audience, called into question the very notion of womanhood in the experience of slave women. Her frequently cited remarks bear reiteration:

Dat man ober dar say dat woman need to be lifted ober ditches, and to have de best place every whar. Nobody eber helped me into carriages, or ober mud puddles, or gives me any best place and ar'n't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me--and ar'n't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear de lash as well--and ar'n't I a woman? I have borne thirteen chilern and seen em mos' all sold off into slavery, and when I cried out with a mother's grief, none but Jesus heard--and ar'n't I a woman?

Truth and Du Bois concur that slavery assaulted the womanhood of slave women, but tellingly they emphasize different aspects of that womanhood: Truth, work and motherhood; Du Bois, sexuality. Both implicitly acknowledge that slavery decisively shaped the experience of slave women--that masters in particular and whites in general enjoyed the power to use and abuse slave women. Both Truth and Du Bois also draw upon an ideal of womanhood, or the idea of being a woman, to provide a standard for that core identity of slave women which resisted the use and abuse. Slave women, both Truth and Du Bois asserted, remained women although they were denied the protections that the dominant white society claimed to offer women, remained women although they were denied the attributes assigned by the dominant white society to womanhood. Du Bois represents the culmination of the most generous version of an Afro-American cultural tradition extending back to the free black community of the antebellum period. For if Du Bois deeply appreciates the strengths and accomplishments of Afro-American women, he also implicitly supports the view that bourgeois domesticity offers the best model for the assimilation of Afro-Americans into their rightful place in American society. He assumes the desirability of stable nuclear families under the leadership of men while allowing plenty of space for women's strength.

The structures and conventions of the white world hedged in slave women almost as firmly as they did white women, albeit more erratically and violently. In this respect, the racist component of class oppression and the black-nationalist dimension of class consciousness and struggle emerge from the history of Afro-American slave women and dramatize problems inherent in all women's history. These racial and nationalist dimensions reinforce rather than negate the class dimension of women's experience. Afro-American slaves did not enjoy the freedom to preserve intact their African ancestors' view of the world. However determined their resistance and however resolute their spirit, forced transplantation to the New World deprived them of the material bases of West African culture, especially in the southern colonies, and later states, of North America, in which the ratio of white to black and the average size of plantations militated against their establishing potentially autonomous enclaves free of white influence. Afro-American culture owed more to the persistent struggle between slaves and masters than to passive acceptance, but recognition of the tenacity of the struggle should not obscure the inescapability of white influence. The interactions between slaveholders and slaves rested upon a prior history of a wide variety of informal interactions between slaveholding and nonslaveholding whites and slaves during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The evidence from slavery and from Reconstruction strongly suggests that black men espoused their own version of "white" views of male dominance within and without the family, and that they actively encouraged the domestic subordination of women as a necessary contribution to the survival and progress of "the race." James Horton has suggested that, at least among the free blacks of the North, this attitude imposed a terrible burden on women. Should women seek, however modestly, to assert their own rights, they were seen as guilty not merely of personal rebellion against one man, but of political rebellion against the interests of their people. Evelyn Brooks has demonstrated how firmly the black men of the National Baptist Convention USA, Incorporated, insisted on the domestic subordination of women as an essential weapon in the struggle for respectability for black people. She has also demonstrated how fiercely the women resisted the men's demands while finding their own ways to struggle against the oppression of black people and promote opportunities for black women.

Women's historians, including Pan-African feminists, question the prevalence of these attitudes, although the evidence strongly suggests that antebellum northern free blacks and many postbellum freed men and women espoused them. Suzanne Lebsock, for example, argues that antebellum free black women, given the opportunity, chose to live without husbands. Other work on the free black women of New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, confirms that there was a strikingly high proportion of free black female heads of households. But census data do not reveal the reasons that free black women chose to avoid marriage, although they do reveal that, because many more free black women than free black men lived in the cities, opportunities for marriage were limited. Lebsock sees their behavior as the manifestation of a commitment to women's networks, but she does not determine whether these women preferred to live without men altogether nor explore all the possible reasons for their avoidance of marriage. At least in New Orleans and Mobile, many free black female heads of households had liaisons with white men, who provided them with property and resources but who could not marry them. In Charleston, many free black women were "married" to slave men. Free black women may have chosen to avoid the control that a husband could legally exercise over their lives, but this reading also suggests that these women expected black men to embrace the dominant white model of gender relations. Alternatively, free black women may have chosen to avoid marriage out of a reasonable concern that the white community would be more likely to view property held by men--as a married woman's property would be--as a potential threat to white dominance. Whatever the explanation, it must be assessed against the powerful evidence that freed men and women enthusiastically sought marriage after emancipation.

The relation between African and Afro-American patterns remains unclear. Let us assume that West African traditions allowed women greater independence from the dominance of one man within a nuclear family than British traditions allowed white women; let us also assume that many of the West African societies from which most slaves came featured distinct matrilineal or matrifocal practices, or both. How should we assess the persistence of those traditions under slavery and their contribution to the slaves' struggles with their masters? And how do we assess the significance of West African practices of polygyny? West African societies did promote clear models of gender relations and, whatever the differences between those and Anglo-Saxon models, they rarely encouraged women's political and military leadership. Throughout the antebellum period, slave women resisted slavery in innumerable ways, but they did not figure among the leadership of the larger, organized revolts. This pattern suggests that the West African values favoring male political and military leadership received powerful support from Anglo-American social and gender relations. In other words, the amalgamation of West African and Anglo-Saxon customs imposed undeniable constraints on slave women, who, like other southern women, forged their lives and identities within the constraints of a specific slave society.

(Continues...)

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Prologue	p. 1
Southern Women, Southern Households	p. 37
The View from the Big House	p. 100
Between Big House and Slave Community	p. 146
Gender Conventions	p. 192
The Imaginative Worlds of Slaveholding Women: Louisa Susanna McCord and Her Countrywomen	p. 242
Women Who Opposed Slavery	p. 290
And Women Who Did Not	p. 334
Epilogue	p. 372
Notes	p. 397
Bibliography	p. 463
Index	p. 531
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

We're the #1 textbook rental company. Let us show you why.

Within the Plantation Household

9780807842324

080784232X

Supplemental Materials

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Rewards Program