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

Marie S. Molloy

Description

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.

Sujets

• Women's Studies
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Women
• Young Widow
• Woman in the Nineteenth Century
• Spinsterhood
• Female education
• Lowell Mill Girls
• Culture of the Southern United States
• Single White Female
• Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
• Mary Boykin Chesnut
• In Defense of Women
• Spinster
• Aunt
• Widow
• Slavery in the United States
• Woman
• Slavery
• The Women
• Louisa May Alcott
• Divorce

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611178715
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South
Single, White, Slaveholding Women in the Nineteenth-Century American South
MARIE S. MOLLOY

The University of South Carolina Press
2018 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-870-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-871-5 (ebook)
Portions of chapters 2 and 3 were previously published in A Noble Class of Old Maids : Surrogate Motherhood, Sibling Support, and Self-Sufficiency in the Nineteenth-Century White, Southern Family, Journal of Family History , Vol. 41 (4). October 2016. pp. 402-29.
Front Cover: Portrait of Mary Susan Ker, courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
For my husband, Darren, and our daughters,
Olivia, Heidi, and Scarlett.
Also for my parents, Jenny and Graham Phillips.
Thank you for believing in me.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 THE CONSTRUCTION OF FEMININITY IN THE ANTEBELLUM SOUTH
Chapter 2 SINGLE WOMEN AND THE SOUTHERN FAMILY
Chapter 3 WORK
Chapter 4 FEMALE FRIENDSHIP
Chapter 5 LAW, PROPERTY, AND THE SINGLE WOMAN
CONCLUSION
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
Posthumous portrait of Mary Telfair (1791-1875), by Carl Ludwig Brandt, 1896
Portrait of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835-1909
Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, 1835-1909
Portrait of Mary Susan Ker, 1838-1923, as a young lady
Portrait of Mary Susan Ker, 1838-1923
The Varner House, Indian Spring, Georgia
Josephine Varner, 1837-1928, as a young woman
Josephine Varner with Ann Campbell at Indian Spring, Georgia
Portrait of Catherine and Tillie (Matilda) Dunbar with friends
Mary Susan Ker in her advanced years
Mary Susan Ker s fourth-grade class, 1905
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of almost ten years work, and it has developed out of a love for southern history. My work began at Keele University in the American Studies Department. When I embarked on this exciting journey, I was a young mother, with two (now three) small children to raise, and I often burned the midnight oil, in pursuit of balancing family life with my passion for researching and writing about southern women s lives in the Civil War era. In following this dream, I have accumulated many professional and personal debts. I am sincerely grateful to the David Bruce Centre at Keele University for their long-term financial and academic and personal support, which has made this book possible. Special thanks to Professor Axel Sch fer and Dr. Laura Sandy for providing their time, expertise, and guidance, and to Professor Martin Crawford and Professor Karen Hunt for their early input into the book, which helped to shape my preliminary ideas that can be traced throughout the book. Professor Ian Bell has demonstrated his unswerving support and keen interest in my work, always offering great encouragement to me in pursuing an academic career. Fellow scholars and friends have likewise kindly given their time and energy in offering to read and comment on various draft chapters, which has further enhanced the final product. I am extremely grateful to Leslie Powner and to my friend Mary Goode in particular.
Throughout the research and writing process, I have benefited from several generous travel grants that have helped to fund my research trips to North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, and Virginia, which were essential in writing the book. These include the Peter Parish Memorial Fund (which is part of the British American Nineteenth Century Historians), the Archie K. Davis Fellowship in North Carolina, the Frances Mellon Fellowship from Virginia Historical Society, and Royal Historical Society funding. Gathering the relevant material on single, white, slaveholding women across the South has been a momentous task, which has led me to several archives in the South. I have mainly worked in six archives: the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscripts Library at Duke University, Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Georgia Historical Society in Savannah, South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston, and South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, Columbia. In each repository I discovered some invaluable collections in addition to helpful and knowledgeable staff. Two individual archivists who deserve a special mention are Barbara Illie at the Southern Historical Collection, who shared her extensive knowledge, but also her southern hospitality with me, and Frances Pollard at the Virginia Historical Society, who always went the extra mile to offer her expertise and advice. It was a great honor to work in such plentiful archives, and to also have the opportunity to explore such beautiful parts of America.
I have benefited enormously from my involvement in conferences, colloquia, seminar series, and workshops in the U.K. and overseas that have provided a richly stimulating and intellectually fruitful environment to learn about and to share my own and other scholars research. I have had the pleasure of speaking at various conferences in the U.K. and the United States, including the Southern Association of Women s Historians at the University of South Carolina in 2009 and the British Nineteenth Century American Historians (BrANCH) special conference in Houston, Texas, in 2013. Here I met several leading scholars in southern history, who fueled my enthusiasm for research, writing, and teaching. The experience of discussing issues such as race, class, and gender in these collegial forums has profoundly enriched my understanding of the South and of southern women s history.
The greatest debt in writing a book such as this is to my family, for their love, support, and encouragement, which has sustained me on this long journey. To my husband, I owe a very special debt of gratitude for listening to all my stories and dilemmas along the way, for fixing computer problems for me, and for the many days that he entertained our three lively daughters; I am so grateful. My three lovely daughters have shown an ongoing interest in what I am writing about and why I am writing it. We even named our youngest daughter Scarlett as she arrived in the midst of my writing, and so it seemed a fitting namesake. There have been countless occasions that I have heard a gentle tapping at my study door, with a voice enquiring, How many words have you written today? It is a wonderful feeling to now tell them that the book is complete. I am enormously thankful to my parents, who have instilled in me a strong desire to succeed. The greatest gift they have given me is self-belief, and the belief that if you have a goal, you should keep going until you achieve it. For as long as I can remember, I have loved to write. As a child, I sat up late at night, writing grandiose stories on my typewriter, and posting the stories off to publishers. I had a dream that I would write stories that would one day be read by other people. I believe my book is the fulfillment of that personal goal, which brings me to my last point, which is to say that first and foremost, this book is inspired by other women s life stories, diligently written and recorded in their letters and personal diaries so many years ago. I remain so grateful that these women kept a record of their lives, so that we as historians might have the privilege of glimpsing a snapshot of the past, and in doing so gain a far better understanding of what women s lives were like in the nineteenth-century American South.
INTRODUCTION
G race Elmore Brown was born in 1839, the fourth-youngest child in a line of eleven, into a privileged, slaveholding family from South Carolina. As a young lady growing up in the heart of the South, in a society in which rigid ideologies of race, class, and gender dominated white women s lives, she wrote with distaste about the gender conventions forced on her as a single, white, slaveholding daughter, which is illuminating. In September 1864, at the age of twenty-five, she confided in her diary: I feel like a bird beating against its cage, so hemmed in am I by other people s ideas, and forced by conventionalities to remain where I cannot live up to, or according to my own. It ought to be with the human family as with all other creatures, each one seeks for themselves the life best suited to them. 1 Grace was referring specifically to her family ties and to the expectations placed on her to conform to nineteenth-century gender conventions that she felt at times limited her autonomy. Grace longed for independence and claimed that she had once shocked her sister with the revelation that married or not I hoped and trusted I would one day have my own establishment independent of everyone else. Marriage has precious little share in my plans for the future. Marriage would hardly be a happy state. 2
Grace s comments seem revolutionary for their time and place; she rejected not only marriage but also a future life in which she would have to be dependent on others. She spoke for a new generation of young women, who chafed against the gender conventions placed on them, but also recognized the need to work within their constraints, in order to pursue a life that best suited them. As Grace freely admitted, self is my idol, however, I may disguise it in benevolence, or in doing it for others, self is my first thought. 3 Gra