The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source ...of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.
Historians of the Civil War often speak of "wars within a war--the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In ...this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War--North and South, white and black, slave and free--showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics. We encounter women as they stood their ground, moved into each other's territory, sought and found common ground, and fought for vastly different principles. Some women used all the tools and powers they could muster to prevent the radical transformations the war increasingly imposed, some fought with equal might for the same transformations, and other women fought simply to keep the war at bay as they waited for their husbands and sons to return home. Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. However, Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.
Scott gives us an expansive and critically important way of thinking about the ways in which former slaves and formerly free black people like Ransier, Bowers, Holmes, and the men and women of Front ...Street Church, understood the meaning of freedom and confronted the “all de day and every day” dignitary offenses they faced in the courts, on sidewalks, on public conveyances, in public places of amusement and houses of worship, and in their daily work and family lives. Her account of the response of cosmopolitan activists and lawmakers In New Orleans has tremendous implications for the struggle elsewhere. The concept of “public rights” that activists in Louisiana located in a “claim to respect in the activities of a shared and social ‘common life,’” excited the cause throughout the South.
Historians of the Civil War often speak of wars within a war--the military fight, wartime struggles on the home front, and the political and moral battle to preserve the Union and end slavery. In ...this broadly conceived book, Thavolia Glymph provides a comprehensive new history of women's roles and lives in the Civil War--North and South, white and black, slave and free--showing how women were essentially and fully engaged in all three arenas. Glymph focuses on the ideas and ideologies that drove women's actions, allegiances, and politics. We encounter women as they stood their ground, moved into each other's territory, sought and found common ground, and fought for vastly different principles. Some women used all the tools and powers they could muster to prevent the radical transformations the war increasingly imposed, some fought with equal might for the same transformations, and other women fought simply to keep the war at bay as they waited for their husbands and sons to return home.
Glymph shows how the Civil War exposed as never before the nation's fault lines, not just along race and class lines but also along the ragged boundaries of gender. However, Glymph makes clear that women's experiences were not new to the mid-nineteenth century; rather, many of them drew on memories of previous conflicts, like the American Revolution and the War of 1812, to make sense of the Civil War's disorder and death.
The Women's Fight: A Coda Glymph, Thavolia
Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas,
05/2021, Letnik:
18, Številka:
2
Book Review
Recenzirano
The Japonicas, Banksia, Lamarque, and Cherokee roses bloomed as usual in the late spring of 1861 alongside wild white lilies in their first glory, and the beautiful but possessive wisteria. Soon the ...cotton blooms would make their first appearance, and if, like Caroline Porcher, one stood far enough away from the labor and sweat that brought them forth, it was possible to appreciate the beauty of the fruit of the hibiscus plant. In the time after the Civil War, Porcher's husband recalled how much she had admired “the beauty of the cotton field” and enjoyed “the white blooms on the first day that turned red the next before falling off.” From their perch as members of South Carolina's slaveholding and ruling class and with the screening distance of power and privilege, Caroline and Frederick A. Porcher had the luxury...
Crying for Home Glymph, Thavolia
Labor (Durham, N.C.),
09/2020, Letnik:
17, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Home is not a little thing,” Toni Morrison wrote in her novel Paradise, a chronicle of, among many things, the search for home—a haven from the racism and violence of the post–Civil War South—by a ...group of 158 formerly enslaved people from Mississippi and Louisiana. To their descendants they bequeath a story of fortitude but also the rejection and ridicule they endured on the journey, of being mocked by “rich Choctow and poor whites, chased by yard dogs, jeered by camp prostitutes and their children.” Most painful, perhaps, was the “contemptuous dismissal” and “aggressive discouragement they received from Negro towns already being built.” Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is similarly a powerful story about the search for home and the meaning of home. “I’m not sure there was ever a harder read...
As W. E. B. Du Bois famously posited in
(1935), the Civil War witnessed a massive slave rebellion. The “general strike,” as Du Bois called it, involved directly the flight of hundreds of thousands of ...slaves and the resistance mounted by those who stayed put and contributed to the destruction of slavery on the South’s plantations and farms and in its cities and towns. This essay suggests, however, that while neither Du Bois nor the scholars who followed him fully grasped the part slave women played in the wartime destruction of slavery, his paradigm-shifting work has the potential to provide a critical opening for this discussion to take place. Like their husbands, fathers, and brothers, enslaved women who engaged the crisis of the Union as an opportunity to secure their freedom risked as much. The Emancipation Proclamation opened a sanctioned path for slave men to pursue freedom through military service. The sanctioned path it offered slave women was also the path of war but without even the veneer of protection black men enjoyed.
