Download or read book The Plantation Mistress written by Catherine Clinton and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 1984-02-12 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering study of the much-mythologized Southern belle offers the first serious look at the lives of white women and their harsh and restricted place in the slave society before the Civil War. Drawing on the diaries, letters, and memoirs of hundreds of planter wives and daughters, Clinton sets before us in vivid detail the daily life of the plantation mistress and her ambiguous intermediary position in the hierarchy between slave and master. "The Plantation Mistress challenges and reinterprets a host of issues related to the Old South. The result is a book that forces us to rethink some of our basic assumptions about two peculiar institutions -- the slave plantation and the nineteenth-century family. It approaches a familiar subject from a new angle, and as a result, permanently alters our understanding of the Old South and women's place in it.
Download or read book Mistresses and Slaves written by Marli Frances Weiner and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marli Weiner challenges much of the received wisdom on the domestic realm of the nineteenth-century southern plantation--a world in which white mistresses and female slaves labored together to provide food, clothing, and medicines to the larger plantation community. Although divided by race, black and white women were joined by common female experiences and expectations of behavior. Because work and gender affected them as much as race, mistresses and female slaves interacted with one another very differently from the ways they interacted with men. Supported by the women's own words, Weiner offers fresh interpretations of the ideology of domesticity that influenced women's race relations before the Civil War, the gradual manner in which they changed during the war, and the harsher behaviors that resulted during Reconstruction. A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Nancy A. Hewitt, and Stephanie Shaw
Download or read book Within the Plantation Household written by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documenting the difficult class relations between women slaveholders and slave women, this study shows how class and race as well as gender shaped women's experiences and determined their identities. Drawing upon massive research in diaries, letters, memoirs, and oral histories, the author argues that the lives of antebellum southern women, enslaved and free, differed fundamentally from those of northern women and that it is not possible to understand antebellum southern women by applying models derived from New England sources.
Download or read book They Were Her Property written by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History A bold and searing investigation into the role of white women in the American slave economy “Compelling.”—Renee Graham, Boston Globe “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave‑owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave‑owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave‑owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.
Download or read book Mistress of Riversdale written by Rosalie Stier Calvert and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A richer reflection of life in early 19th-century Maryland and the Washington environs cannot be found. -- Washington Post Book World
Download or read book Out of the House of Bondage written by Thavolia Glymph and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.
Download or read book Anna written by Anna Matilda King and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the wife of a frequently absent slaveholder and public figure, Anna Matilda Page King (1798-1859) was the de facto head of their Sea Island plantation. This volume collects more than 150 letters to her husband, children, parents, and others. Conveying the substance of everyday life as they chronicle King's ongoing struggles to put food on the table, nurse her "family black and white," and keep faith with a disappointing husband, the letters offer an absorbing firsthand account of antebellum coastal Georgia life. Anna Matilda Page was reared with the expectation that she would marry a planter, have children, and tend to her family's domestic affairs. Untypically, she was also schooled by her father in all aspects of plantation management, from seed cultivation to building construction. That grounding would serve her well. By 1842 her husband's properties were seized, owing to debts amassed from crop failures, economic downturns, and extensive investments in land, enslaved workers, and the development of the nearby port town of Brunswick. Anna and her family were sustained, however, by Retreat, the St. Simons Island property left to her in trust by her father. With the labor of fifty bondpeople and "their increase" she was to strive, with little aid from her husband, to keep the plantation solvent. A valuable record of King's many roles, from accountant to mother, from doctor to horticulturist, the letters also reveal much about her relationship with, and attitudes toward, her enslaved workers. Historians have yet to fully understand the lives of plantation mistresses left on their own by husbands pursuing political and other professional careers. Anna Matilda Page King's letters give us insight into one such woman who reluctantly entered, but nonetheless excelled in, the male domains of business and agriculture.
Download or read book A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War written by Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard and published by Women's Diaries and Letters of. This book was released on 1996 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prelude to the diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut & Emma Holmes.
Download or read book Neither Lady Nor Slave written by Susanna Delfino and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving southern women's history beyond the plantation, these 13 essays (11 of them never before published) explore the working lives of ordinary women--free black, white, and Native American--in the antebellum South.
Download or read book Tara Revisited Women War the Plantation Legend written by Catherine Clinton and published by WW Norton. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cutting through romantic myth, this captivating volume combines period photographs and illustrations with new documentary sources to tell the real story of southern women during the Civil War. Drawing from a wealth of poignant letters, diaries, slave narratives, and other accounts, Catherine Clinton provides a vivid social and cultural history of the diverse communities of Southern women during the Civil War: the heroic African-American women who struggled for freedom, the tireless nurses who faced gruesome duties, the intriguing handful who donned uniforms, and those brave women who spied and even died for the Confederacy. Photographs, drawings, prints, and other period illustrations bring this buried chapter of Civil War history to life, taking the reader from the cotton fields to the hearthsides, from shrapnel-riddled mansions to slave cabins. Clinton places these women within the context of war, illuminating both legendary and anonymous women along the way. Tracing oral traditions and Southern literature from Reconstruction through our era, the author demonstrates how a deadly mix of sentiment and fabrication perpetuates tales of idyllic plantations inhabited by benevolent masters and contented slaves. The book concludes with Clinton's perceptive and often witty discussion of how, over the years, we continue to embrace mythic figures like Scarlett and Mammy in aspects of popular culture ranging from Hollywood epics to pancake syrup.
Download or read book Fanny Kemble s Civil Wars written by Catherine Clinton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the British stage star turned plantation mistress, whose abolitionist writings made her an unlikely heroine of the Union cause--and whose life intersected in bold and dramatic ways with the most tumultuous of American conflicts, the Civil War. 64 illustrations.
Download or read book A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War written by Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An excellent prelude to the well-known wartime diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Emma Holmes, the diary of Keziah Brevard documents one plantation mistress's personal reflections on the events that were to shape both her world and her Southern homeland for years to come: the election of Abraham Lincoln, South Carolina's secession convention, and the attack on Fort Sumter." "In 1860 Keziah Brevard was a fifty-seven-year-old widow living nine miles from Columbia, South Carolina, with her slaves as her only companions. She kept a diary to record thoughts and a great variety of matters - from dramatic events of national importance to her management of three plantations and a grist mill. Brevard reacted strongly to the political ferment of the period. Entries during the month of October 1860 were outright assaults on "the rabble of the North." And her words of November 9 showed extreme emotion: "Oh My God!!! This morning heard that Lincoln was elected." The act of secession, however, failed to stir similar passions; nor did the firing on Fort Sumter elicit extensive comment. But her relatively long entries of January and February are quite another matter; during those weeks in early 1861 Brevard wrestled privately with the morality of secession and slavery." "In the difficult times of the Old South's twilight, Keziah Brevard had several distinct advantages including a keen mind, shrewd business sense, relatively good health, and substantial financial resources. Her diary reveals a competent, no-nonsense woman capable of successfully leading a large household as well as several business enterprises."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Garden Diary of Martha Turnbull Mistress of Rosedown Plantation written by Martha Turnbull and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recovered in the mid-1990s from the attic of a Turnbull family descendant, Martha Turnbull's garden diary offers the most extensive surviving first-hand account of nineteenth-century plantation life and gardening in the Deep South. Landscape architecture professor and preservationist Suzanne Turner spent fifteen years transcribing and annotating the original manuscript, making it accessible to twenty-first-century gardening enthusiasts. The resulting dialogue between Turnbull's diary entries and Turner's illuminating notes demonstrates the pivotal role that kitchen and pleasure gardens held in the lives of planter families. In addition, the diary documents the relationship between the mistress and the enslaved whose labor made her vast gardens possible. Turner's exquisite interpretation reveals not only an energetic gardener but also a well-read one, eager to experiment with the newest gardening trends. Illustrated with engravings from period books, journals, and nursery catalogs, Turner's annotations provide the reader with a deeper understanding of American horticultural history. The diary, spanning the years 1836 through 1894, reveals the portrait of a courageous and resilient woman. After the tragic loss of her two sons and husband prior to the Civil War, Martha assumed full responsibility for her family and the plantation. She endured living under siege during the war and persevered during Reconstruction by growing and selling food as a truck farmer. By working daily in her ornamental garden and faithfully maintaining her diary for nearly sixty years, she found the solace and peace to look forward to the future.
Download or read book The Fancy Gal written by Sharon J. Willis and published by . This book was released on 1919-06-30 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Power of Their Will written by Teresa Prados-Torreira and published by University Alabama Press. This book was released on 2021-01-26 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A valuable narrative of the often paradoxical and conflicting human bonds between female owners and the enslaved in nineteenth-century Cuba In the early nineteenth century, while abolitionism was rising and the slave trade was declining in the Atlantic world, Spain used this opportunity to massively expand plantation slavery in Cuba. Between 1501 and 1866, more than 778,000 Africans were torn from their homelands and brought to work for the Cuban slaveholding class. An understudied aspect of Cuban slaveholding society is the role of the white Cuban slave mistress (amas). The Power of Their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba illuminates the interaction of female slaveholders and the enslaved during this time. Teresa Prados-Torreira shows, despite the lack of political power in a highly patriarchal society, Cuban women as property owners were instrumental in supporting the long duration of slavery, whether by enforcing the disciplining of the enslaved in the domestic sphere or helping to create the illusion of slavery as a humane institution. Thousands of Creole slaveholding women relied on slaves to lead a comfortable life. Even the subsistence of many poor women depended on the income derived from the hiring out of their enslaved. In this accessible cultural history, culled from government documents, fiction, newspaper articles, traveler’s accounts, women’s wills, and archival research, Prados-Torreira coalesces a valuable narrative out of the often paradoxical and conflicting stories of the human bonds between the female owner and the enslaved. Narrative chapters, enlivened by vignettes, describe the daily life of slave mistresses in the main cities of Havana and Santiago and other towns, workings of sugar mills and coffee plantations, how slaveholding women coping with slave rebellions and wartime during the Ten Years’ War, and how personal relationships could occasionally affect the balance of power.
Download or read book A Tale of Two Plantations written by Richard S. Dunn and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.
Download or read book Closer to Freedom written by Stephanie M. H. Camp and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.
