Synopses & Reviews
Although historians over the past two decades have written extensively on the plantation mistress and the slave woman, they have largely neglected the world of the working woman.
Neither Lady nor Slave pushes southern history beyond the plantation to examine the lives and labors of ordinary southern women--white, free black, and Indian.
Contributors to this volume illuminate women's involvement in the southern market economy in all its diversity. Thirteen essays explore the working lives of a wide range of women--nuns and prostitutes, iron workers and basket weavers, teachers and domestic servants--in urban and rural settings across the South. By highlighting contrasts between paid and unpaid, officially acknowledged and "invisible" work within the context of cultural attitudes regarding women's proper place in society, the book sheds new light on the ambiguities that marked relations between race, class, and gender in the modernizing South.
Contributors
E. Susan Barber, College of Notre Dame of Maryland (Baltimore, Md.)
Bess Beatty, Oregon State University (Eugene, Ore.)
Emily Bingham (Louisville, Ky.)
James Taylor Carson, Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada)
Emily Clark, University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg, Miss.)
Stephanie Cole, University of Texas at Arlington (Arlington, Tex.)
Susanna Delfino, University of Genoa (Genoa, Italy)
Michele Gillespie, Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, N.C.)
Sarah Hill (Atlanta, Ga.)
Barbara J. Howe, West Virginia University (Morgantown, W. Va.)
Timothy J. Lockley, University of Warwick (Coventry, England)
Stephanie McCurry, Northwestern University (Evanston, Ill.)
Diane Batts Morrow, University of Georgia (Athens, Ga.)
Penny L. Richards, UCLA Center for the Study of Women (Los Angeles, Calif.)
Review
These essays represent the cutting edge of the discipline of southern women's history. They are deeply and thoroughly researched, powerfully conceived and elegantly presented.
(LeeAnn Whites, University of Missouri)
Review
The editors have assembled a collection that is remarkable for its diversity and breadth. It brings together outstanding examples of current scholarship on women's work and the economic impact of women in a wide variety of settings.
(Robert C. McMath Jr., Georgia Institute of Technology)
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Susanna Delfino is senior researcher and professor of American history at the University of Genoa in Italy.Michele Gillespie is associate professor of history at Wake Forest University.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. The Rural World and the Coming of the Market Economy
James Taylor Carson
Chapter 2. Made by the Hands of Indians: Cherokee Women and Trade
Sarah H. Hill
Chapter 3. Producing Dependence: Women, Work, and Yeoman Households in Low-Country South Carolina
Stephanie McCurry
Part II. Wage-Earning Women in the Urban South
Chapter 4. A White Woman, of Middle Age, Would Be Preferred: Children's Nurses in the Old South
Stephanie Cole
Chapter 5. Spheres of Influence: Working White and Black Women in Antebellum Savannah
Timothy J. Lockley
Chapter 6. Patient Laborers: Women at Work in the Formal Economy of West(ern) Virginia
Barbara J. Howe
Part III. Women as Unacknowledged Professionals
Chapter 7. Depraved and Abandoned Women: Prostitution in Richmond, Virginia, across the Civil War
E. Susan Barber
Chapter 8. The Female Academy and Beyond: Mordecai Sisters at Work in the Old South
Emily Bingham and Penny Richards
Chapter 9. Peculiar Professionals: The Financial Strategies of the New Orleans Ursulines
Emily Clark
Chapter 10. Faith and Frugality in Antebellum Baltimore: The Economic Credo of the Oblate Sisters of Providence
Diane Batts Morrow
Part IV. Working Women in the Industrial South
Chapter 11. I Can't Get My Bored on Them Old Lomes: The Work and Resistance of Female Textile Laborers in the Antebellum South
Bess Beatty
Chapter 12. To Harden a Lady's Hand: Gender Politics, Racial Realities, and Women Millworkers in Antebellum Georgia
Michele Gillespie
Chapter 13. Invisible Woman: Female Labor in the Upper South's Iron and Mining Industries
Susanna Delfino
Contributors
Index