An analysis and evaluation of the role of sexuality and race in defining the social position of women during the years 1607 ? 1890.
Written in 2002; 1,840 words; 7 sources; MLA; $ 59.95
Paper Summary:
This paper considers the status of women as a reflection of their sexuality and race. It looks at the social status of women in the period of slavery in the southern U.S., and highlights the differences between slaves and slaveholders. Women of the Victorian era, Colonial times, American Revolution and Native American women are also discussed.
From the Paper:
"Women have always maintained a different social position than men, and it has usually been based on their gender and sexuality. Women attain these positions in a wide variety of ways, from using marriage as a stepping-stone, to creating their own roles defined by their sexuality. "For example, Mary Jenkins Chambers, the mistress of a planter household, had worked her way into the highest echelons of southern society through the time-honored fashion of 'marrying up.' In 1831, while still a teenager, she married Joseph Hart, only to become widowed before her twenty-first birthday. In 1834, she married Elijah Barnett, whom she also outlived, and she married her final husband, Asa Chambers, of Montgomery County, at the age of forty-one in 1856. As the owner of twenty-one slaves and eight hundred acres of land, Chambers was one of Montgomery County's wealthiest men" (Bynum 16).
In the South, being a white woman in Southern society meant confronting the issue of slavery sometime during your life. "Because the institutions of the family and slavery were interlocked, white women occupied an important place in the cultural and economic life of southern society. Wives of slaveholders served as conduits for the transmission of power and property from one generation to the next. As caretakers of the family, they also oversaw much of the daily workings of the slave system. Finally, as the repository of a southern code of honor that regarded them as symbols of racial and sexual purity, white women maintained the racial distinctions that were crucial to the continued hegemony of white men" (Bynum 64). The planter's wives served as a beacon of gentility, and looked the other way when their husbands sired mulatto children with the slave women. Their place in society was accepted and secure, as long as they kept their mouths shut."
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