Description
Book SynopsisDiscussing the roles of women in an urban slave society, this book takes up issues of gender, race, condition (slave or free), and class and examines the ways each contributed to conveying and replicating power. It analyses what it meant to be a woman in a world where historically specific social classifications determined personal destiny.
Trade ReviewRejecting the clash between the categories of race, class, and gender for analytical supremacy, Kennedy (Clarion Univ.) has written a detailed, nuanced study of the lives of women—white and black, free and unfree—in Colonial and antebellum Charleston. As the title suggests, the women of Charleston, regardless of station, were bound together in a remarkably complex web of social relations, and how women experienced their lives was determined in large part by how they negotiated this intricate web. Embedded in this web was a ubiquitous notion of the ideal woman, which was defined by the prevailing patriarchy. While they sometimes chafed against this ideal, women also used it to their advantage, individually and collectively. Change also affected the lives of women in Charleston: the Revolution marked an expansion of what women believed they had a right to expect, legally and socially, and further complicated relationships between women by reinvigorating slavery. Kennedy draws upon the now expansive body of scholarship on Southern women's history and the history of slavery and concentrates on the unique urban setting of Charleston to illuminate new dimensions of women's history. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper—division undergraduates and abov
-- J. J. Rogers * Choice *
. . . Kennedy . . . has written a detailed, nuanced study of the lives of women—white and black, free and unfree—in Colonial and antebellum Charleston. . . . [She] draws upon the now expansive body of scholarship on Southern women's history and the history of slavery and concentrates on the unique urban setting of Charleston to illuminate new dimensions of women's history. . . . Recommended.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I. The Place, the War, the First Reconstruction
1. The Place and the People
2. Disorder and Chaos of War
3. Rebuilding and Resisting
Part II. Defining Women, Defining Their Braided Relations
4. Marriage and Cohabitation within the Aristocratic Paradigm: Wealthy White Women and the Free Brown Elite
5. Marriage and Cohabitation outside the Aristocratic Paradigm: Slaves and Free Laboring Women
6. Mixing and Admixtures
7. Work and Workers
8. Leisure and Recreation
9. Women and the Law
10. Illness and Death
Conclusion
Appendix 1. Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Applications
Appendix 2. South Carolina Court System and the Case Universe
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
