Annotated Bibliography

Kristen Dunn

July 25, 2005

Women of the South

My research paper is about the white women in the Antebellum South. My paper will focus on how women maintained their homes and conducted their household duties. I will focus particularly on women on plantations in the South compared to other white women of lower classes in the same geographic region.

Secondary Sources

1. Clinton Catherine, ed. Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

This book is a collection of ten previously published essays which document the lives of African-American, Native American, and white southern women. The book challenges the stereotypes of the lives and attitudes of some southern women. I would use this book to find out differences in race, class, slavery, and gender among plantation mistresses and slave women as well as their lives with their plantation masters.

2. Clinton Catherine. The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South. New York: Pantheon Books, 1983.

This book details the life of a plantation mistress in the South. It gives intricate details of how white women lived and worked on their plantations with at least twenty slaves. It demonstrates what her role was really like. This book would be an excellent source for my paper because of its great details about her life. It tells me how they maintained their household as well as their plantation and their slaves.

3. Delfino, Susanna and Michele Gillespie, eds. Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

This book examines women’s work all over the South. It demonstrates that antebellum women were neither plantation mistresses nor bondswomen. It focuses on the many tasks that all sorts of classes of women took part in. These women were free but often very poor and they tried their hand at many tasks in many settings throughout the South. The book talks about urban working women, paid and unpaid, as well as rural working women, paid and unpaid. It gives insight to what each type of woman’s work life was like whether she was paid in the textile industry or not paid at all for her work in her own home. I would use this book for my research in many ways. It would provide me with details, not just about the plantation women but also women in the textile industry as well as poorer white women of lower classes. It also gives me information about Yeoman women in low-country South Carolina and women’s work in Savannah, Georgia. This information makes great research for comparison purposes across the geographic region of the South.

4. Harris, William J., ed. Society and Culture in the Slave South. London; New York: Routledge, 1992.

This book primarily focuses on the slave south. It includes several excerpts from other collections. It details mainly slavery as a system of class relationships. I would use this book for the excerpts about the gender conflict and subservient role of southern white women and the interactions between blacks and whites, both males and females.

5. Pease, Jane. Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

This book focuses on stepping away from the idea of separate spheres as a way of interpreting women’s lives in the South. Instead, it takes this idea and changes it to a spectrum—on one end is full autonomy and on the other is complete dependence. The book argues that most lives of women during the antebellum period ranged along this spectrum instead of being on one end or the other. This book would be very useful to my research because it deals with limits of class, race and social status and the constraints in which women made their choice about which end of the spectrum they were on. I could also use this book because it deals with differences of women in Charleston and Boston which gives me a great comparison for women’s lives.

6. Scott, Anne Firor. The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

This book is about antebellum women and their determination to find meaning in their work. It focuses on how a woman’s world was divided by race, class and gender. After the Civil War, women pulled away from their homes and they were able to develop a sense of self-confidence. Although this book deals a lot with politics, it would be a good source for my research. I would use it to see how women’s work lives affected their political lives throughout the antebellum period and after the Civil War.

7. Spruill, Julia Cherry. Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1938.

This book is about the women of the colonial South. The author conducts research about every aspect of the female life. She studied southern women’s everyday life, their function in the settlement of colonies, their homes and domestic occupations, their recreations and social lives, as well as their participation in affairs outside the home. She also looked at how they were regarded by the law and by society in general. This book would be an excellent source for my research because it does go into such detail about not just women’s work, but many other parts of their lives. It details their duties inside and outside the home as well as the way they were viewed by the legal system and by society overall. This book would give me ample information for my research on women in the South and how they lived their lives from many different aspects.

8. Sumner, Helen L. “The Historical Development of Women’s Work in the United States.” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, Volume 30, No. 3, Control or Fate in Economic Affairs (May, 1971), 101-113.

This journal article examines how women’s work in the United States has evolved over time. During the colonial time period women worked for gain whether it be selling to a local storekeeper their products from sewing, knitting, or weaving or hiring themselves out to work for the families of their neighbors. This article details how a great transformation came about during the nineteenth century that changed women’s economic position. The article divides women’s labor up into five categories: unpaid labor, independent gainful labor, domestic service, wage labor in manufacturing industries and wage labor in trade and transportation. These categories show us the variety of changes that have taken place in women’s work. I would use this article to research how different classes of women changed their work over time in the United States. This article deals with a bigger picture by examining the United States as opposed to just the South but still contains a great amount of information that I could use in my research particularly for comparison of upper, middle and lowers class white women’s work.

9. Tracy, Susan Jean. In the Master’s Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

This book is a study of six southern writers and their works. It is a study about an evaluation of historical writing about the South. One of the main topics of the book deals with the planter class at the time when it took the offensive against antislavery Southerners and Northerners. The basis of the book is on gender and class relations as well as race relations. It details the antebellum southern society. The book represents women, blacks and poor whites. Although this book deals primarily with slavery it does give good comparisons for my research purposes. It allows the reader to see differences among the class lines which is an excellent resource for my paper. I would use it to demonstrate the idea of the Antebellum south as a patriarchal society and what women, blacks and poor whites dealt with under this society.

Primary Sources

1. Brevard, Keziah Goodwin Hopkins and Moore, John Hammond, ed. A Plantation Mistress on the Eve of the Civil War: The Diary of Keziah Goodwin Hopkins Brevard, 1860-1861. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

This is the diary of woman who was fifty seven years old at the time that she documented her life as a plantation mistress. She only wrote this diary between 1860-1861, as the Civil War approached. I believe that this collection would be useful to my research because it would give me insight to an older woman on a plantation and what her life may have been like just before the beginning of the Civil War. Although it only details one year of her life as a plantation mistress, I believe that this collection could provide insight to her life at such a critical time in our country’s history. This diary would be obtainable for my research paper with a visit to the nation’s capital at the Library of Congress.

2. Calvert, Rosalie Stier and Callcott, Margaret Law, ed. Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert, 1795-1821. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991.

These are letters of a plantation mistress from the period of 1795-1821. It appears that she was the plantation mistress of Riversdale. This collection is quite large at 407 pages. I believe that it would be useful to my research topic because it does span a period of twenty-six years. I would hope to find information about how her everyday life changed within those twenty-six years as well as how her life stayed the same. I would hope that she would detail how she ran her plantation and took care of her home and her slaves. I think that this collection would provide a lot of good research for my paper. It would be easily obtainable with a visit to the nation’s capitol at the Library of Congress.

3. Garrett, Emma Louise. Garrett/Boyd Family Papers. 1858-1959. Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Georgia.

These papers of Emma Louise (Garrett) Boyd between the years of 1858-1959, include correspondence, diaries, education, marriage, and legal and financial papers. One of the topics included in this collection is about women in Georgia. The collection focuses a lot on women’s education at many institutions in Georgia. It also includes information about the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Daughters of the Confederacy. I believe that this collection of family papers would provide insight to the correspondence between this woman and her husband and what her life was like in Georgia. I am not sure what social class she belongs to for comparison purposes but would hope to find that within this collection. This is a large collection of twenty-four cubic feet and could be easily visited at the Atlanta History Center at any time.

4. King, Anna Matilda and Lindsay, Melanie Pavich, ed. Anna: The Letters of a St. Simon’s Island Plantation Mistress, 1817-1859. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

These are letters of a woman that was nineteen years old when she began her collection. She writes about her life for forty-two years. Her collection should include details about her plantation in St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. I would hope to find details of her life as she grew up and how her ways of work changed from being a young woman on the plantation at nineteen and how her work changed as she grew older. I think that because this collection does span over such a large time period, I could find information specific to the antebellum period in which I am researching. Her collection spans from 1817-1859 which is the peak time period that I would be researching. This collection could be obtained easily on a trip to our nation’s capitol at the Library of Congress.