Within the Plantation Household - (Gender and American Culture) by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Paperback)

About the Book

Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South

Book Synopsis

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.

From the Back Cover

This important book challenges many current notions about antebellum southern women, white and black. Bound in a web of intimacy fraught with violence, the lives of slave women were intertwined, but they were never linked in sisterhood. Although mistresses and slaves shared a common household, they were radically different from each other, and Within the Plantation Household documents the difficult class relations between slaveholding and slave women.

Review Quotes

"We have to thank a daughter of the Deep North for digging up and presenting more neglected testimony of plantation mistresses and their servants than has ever before been assembled so fully or organized and analyzed so cogently and provocatively."--C. Vann Woodward, New York Review of Books