Antebellum Southern Plantation Household

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews and discusses the role of plantation wives and black slave women in the Antebellum south and examines various literary works written on this subject. The paper concludes by saying that the 1850s saw the end of slavery and Southern women produced novels describing plantation life in idyllic terms, obliquely responding to the abolitionists' critique of slave law.

From the Paper:

"Despite the available sexual buffet the white male plantation owners have with their wives and female slaves, the "grin-and-bear-it" attitude of the plantation wives continues since outside the home abode the oldest profession was available to satisfy the variety needs of the alpha male. In Delfino and Gillespie Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South (2002), they acknowledged that there were "women who were 'unacknowledged professionals,' focusing on three lines of work that were open to women in the antebellum South. Two of these, at least, were viable options for women long before the market revolution: prostitution and convent life. E. Susan Barber argues that earlier historians, beholden to cultural narratives that denied interracial sex and exalted the sexual purity of white women, largely ignored the evidence of sexual commerce in the antebellum South. As she reveals in her exhaustive analysis of census records from Richmond, prostitution thrived in the city and could be particularly lucrative for women who owned brothels. (Delfino and Gillespie, 2002)" This clearly points out the supreme dominance of men in the area of sexual prowess because the availability of prostitution catered not only to the working man but all men in the strata of the society. "

Sample of Sources Used:

• Cashin, Joan E., Coski, John M., Faust, Drew Gilpin, Feely, Amy R., Glymph, Thavolia, Rable, George C., Wheeler, Marjorie Spruill, Campbell, Edward D. C. (Editor), Lebsock, Suzanne (Introduction). A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy (The Museum of the Confederacy). University of Virginia Press: 1997.
• Delfino, Susanna and Gillespie, Michele (eds.). Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
• Editors of LexisNexis. "Southern Women and Their Families in the 19th Century." Series A, Holdings of the Southern Historical Collections, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. University Publications of America. 1991. 22 October 2006. <http://www.lexisnexis.com/academic/guides/womens_studies/southern_women/swmna5.asp>.
• Gatewood, Willard B. "Southern History Across the Color Line by Nell Irvin Painter - Book Review." African American Review. Winter, 2002. 22 October 2006. <http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_4_36/ai_97515895>.
• Kierner, Cynthia A. Beyond the Household: Women's Place in the Early South 1700-1835. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

More papers on Antebellum Southern Plantation Household:

• Persuasive Essay # 146445 : "Antebellum Slave Families: The Two Parent Household"
• Essay # 100652 : "Colonization of the Southern Colonies"
• Book Review # 125865 : "The Plantation Complex"

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