Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Gender and American Culture) - Softcover

"Asks us to put aside simple generalizations and explore the complicated world that masters and slaves built together on their terms, not ours. . . . Fox-Genovese provides a rich analysis . . . without losing her critical eye or her amazing capacity for empathy. Like no other historian before or since." -- "Civil War Times" Virtually every sentence stimulates and every page challenges. . . . A vivid, extensive chonicle of Southern women's daily existence .--"Publisher's Weekly" [A] well-written and thoroughly researched social history.--"New Yorker" An ambitious book . . . . Elizabeth Fox-Genovese elevates American women's history to a new level of sophistication.--Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University Elizabeth Fox-Genovese . . . . succeeds brilliantly.--Mechal Sobel, "New York Times Book Review" YA well-written and thoroughly researched social history."New Yorker" "Elizabeth Fox-Genovese . . . . succeeds brilliantly.Mechal Sobel, "New York Times Book Review"" "An ambitious book . . . . Elizabeth Fox-Genovese elevates American women's history to a new level of sophistication.Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University" "Virtually every sentence stimulates and every page challenges. . . . A vivid, extensive chonicle of Southern women's daily existence ."Publisher's Weekly""

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. |A powerful historical study in which the author's use of letters, memoirs, oral histories, as well as extensive archival sources bring black and white women's lives and identities to light in the antebellum South. ""Elizabeth Fox-Genovese undertakes the enormous tasks of telling the life stories of the last generation of black and white women of the Old South, and of analyzing the meanings of these connected stories as a way of illuminating both Southern and women's history--tasks at which she succeeds brilliantly.""--Mechal Sobel, New York Times Book Review ""[A] well-written and thoroughly researched social history.""-- New Yorker