Women of the American South

Women of the American South
Author: Christie Anne Farnham
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 329
Release: 1997-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0814728405

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Among the most prominent icons of the American south is that of the southern belle, immortalized by such figures as Scarlett O'Hara, Dolly Madison, and Lucy Pickens (whose elegant image graced the Confederate $100 bill). And yet the women of America's south iave always defied pat generalization, no more readily forced into facle categories than women in the country's other regions. Never before has a book of southern history so successfully integrated the experiences of white and non-white women. Among the myriad subjects addressed in the book are black women's suffrage, the economic realities of Choctaw women, female kin and female slaves in planters's wills, the northern myth of the rebel girl, second wave feminism in the South, and southern lesbians. Bringing to light the lives of Cherokee women, Appalachian "coal daughters," and Jewish women in the South, the essays all but one published in this book for the first time, ensure that monolithic representations of southern womanhood are a thing of the past. Filling a crucial gap in southern history and women's history, Women of the American South is a valuable reference and pedagogical aid for a wide range of scholars and students.

They Were Her Property

They Were Her Property
Author: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 443
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300245106

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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 “Stunning.”—Rebecca Onion, Slate “Makes a vital contribution to our understanding of our past and present.”—Parul Sehgal, New York Times “Bracingly revisionist. . . . [A] startling corrective.”—Nicholas Guyatt, New York Review of Books 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.

Mothers of Invention

Mothers of Invention
Author: Drew Gilpin Faust
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2004-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780807855737

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Exploring privileged Confederate women's wartime experiences, this book chronicles the clash of the old and the new within a group that was at once the beneficiary and the victim of the social order of the Old South.

Southern Women

Southern Women
Author: Sally Gregory McMillen
Publisher:
Total Pages: 176
Release: 1992
Genre: History
ISBN:

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Sally G. McMillen summarizes 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. -- Amazon.com.

Half Sisters of History

Half Sisters of History
Author: Catherine Clinton
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 254
Release: 1994-09-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822381885

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Long relegated to the margins of historical research, the history of women in the American South has rightfully gained prominence as a distinguished discipline. A comprehensive and much-needed tribute to southern women’s history, Half Sisters of History brings together the most important work in this field over the past twenty years. This collection of essays by pioneering scholars surveys the roots and development of southern women’s history and examines the roles of white women and women of color across the boundaries of class and social status from the founding of the nation to the present. Authors including Anne Firor Scott, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, and Nell Irwin Painter, among others, analyze women’s participation in prewar slavery, their representation in popular fiction, and their involvement in social movements. In no way restricted to views of the plantation South, other essays examine the role of women during the American Revolution, the social status of Native American women, the involvement of Appalachian women in labor struggles, and the significance of women in the battle for civil rights. Because of their indelible impact on gender relations, issues of class, race, and sexuality figure centrally in these analyses. Half Sisters of History will be important not only to women’s historians, but also to southern historians and women’s studies scholars. It will prove invaluable to anyone in search of a full understanding of the history of women, the South, or the nation itself. Contributors. Catherine Clinton, Sara Evans, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Jacqueline Jones, Suzanne D. Lebsock, Nell Irwin Painter, Theda Perdue, Anne Firor Scott, Deborah Gray White

Unruly Women

Unruly Women
Author: Victoria E. Bynum
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2016-08-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469616998

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In this richly detailed and imaginatively researched study, Victoria Bynum investigates "unruly" women in central North Carolina before and during the Civil War. Analyzing the complex and interrelated impact of gender, race, class, and region on the lives of black and white women, she shows how their diverse experiences and behavior reflected and influenced the changing social order and political economy of the state and region. Her work expands our knowledge of black and white women by studying them outside the plantation setting. Bynum searched local and state court records, public documents, and manuscript collections to locate and document the lives of these otherwise ordinary, obscure women. Some appeared in court as abused, sometimes abusive, wives, as victims and sometimes perpetrators of violent assaults, or as participants in ilicit, interracial relationships. During the Civil War, women freqently were cited for theft, trespassing, or rioting, usually in an effort to gain goods made scarce by war. Some women were charged with harboring evaders or deserters of the Confederacy, an act that reflected their conviction that the Confederacy was destroying them. These politically powerless unruly women threatened to disrupt the underlying social structure of the Old South, which depended on the services and cooperation of all women. Bynum examines the effects of women's social and sexual behavior on the dominant society and shows the ways in which power flowed between private and public spheres. Whether wives or unmarried, enslaved or free, women were active agents of the society's ordering and dissolution.

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South
Author: Marie S. Molloy
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1611178711

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A broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in the slaveholding South Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South investigates the lives of unmarried white women—from the pre- to the post-Civil War South—within a society that placed high value on women's marriage and motherhood. Marie S. Molloy examines female singleness to incorporate non-marriage, widowhood, separation, and divorce. These single women were not subject to the laws and customs of coverture, in which females were covered or subject to the governance of fathers, brothers, and husbands, and therefore lived with greater autonomy than married women. Molloy contends that the Civil War proved a catalyst for accelerating personal, social, economic, and legal changes for these women. Being a single woman during this time often meant living a nuanced life, operating within a tight framework of traditional gender conventions while manipulating them to greater advantage. Singleness was often a route to autonomy and independence that over time expanded and reshaped traditional ideals of southern womanhood. Molloy delves into these themes and their effects through the lens of the various facets of the female life: femininity, family, work, friendship, law, and property. By examining letters and diaries of more than three hundred white, native-born, southern women, Molloy creates a broad and eloquent study on the relatively overlooked population of single women in both the urban and plantation slaveholding South. She concludes that these women were, in various ways, pioneers and participants of a slow, but definite process of change in the antebellum era.

Women and the American Civil War

Women and the American Civil War
Author: Judith Ann Giesberg
Publisher:
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781606353400

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"In a series of eight paired essays, scholars compare the experiences of Northern and Southern women in the U.S. Civil War"--

Southern Women

Southern Women
Author: Sally G. McMillen
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1119147727

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The third edition of Southern Women relays the historical narrative of both black and white women in the patriarchal South. Covering primarily the years between 1800 and 1865, it shows the strengths and varied experiences of these women—on plantations, small farms, in towns and cities, in the Deep South, the Upper South, and the mountain South. It offers fascinating information on family life, sexuality, and marriage; reproduction and childrearing; education and religion; women and work; and southern women and the Confederacy. Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South, Third Edition distills and incorporates recent scholarship by historians. It presents a well-written, more complicated, multi-layered picture of Southern women’s lives than has ever been written about before—thanks to its treatment of current, relevant historiographical debates. The book also: Includes new scholarship published since the second edition appeared Pays more attention to women in the Deep South, especially the experiences of those living in Louisiana and Mississippi Is part of the highly successful American History Series The third edition of Southern Women: Black and White in the Old South will serve as a welcome supplementary text in college or community-college-level survey courses in U.S., Women’s, African-American, or Southern history. It will also be useful as a reference for graduate seminars or colloquia.