Women Defining and Defying the Color Line

Carla Anzilotti. In the Affairs of the World: Women, Patriarchy, and Power in Colonial South Carolina. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2002. 232 pp. ISBN 0-313-32031-4 (cl).

Kirsten Fischer. Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. 288 pp.; ill.; maps. ISBN 0-8014-3822-5 (cl); ISBN 0-8014-8679-3 (pb).

Nell Irvin Painter. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2002. 264 pp.; ill.; index. ISBN 0-8078-2692-8 (cl); ISBN 0-8078-5360-7 (pb).

Pauline Schloesser. The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic. New York: New York University Press, 2002. 304 pp. ISBN 0-8147-9763-6 (cl).

From very different vantage points, Carla Anzilotti, Kirsten Fischer, Nell Irvin Painter, and Pauline Schloesser illuminate the relationship between Anglo-American patriarchy and racial slavery. Their books cut a wide chronological and geographical swath, from colonial South and North Carolina to a study of New England in the Revolutionary and early national periods and essays traversing the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South. In exploring the intersectional relationship between patriarchy and slavery, the authors provide exceptional insights into white women's pivotal role in creating and perpetuating categories of "whiteness" and "blackness." We learn more about the social systems, at once painfully human and inhumane, that such categories support. Yet these books point as well to the ways in which intellectual constructs employed to understand race and gender can yield a curiously disembodied history of the very people whose lives lay at the heart of women's and African American history.

In the Affairs of the World examines women planters from colonial South Carolina. Carla Anzilotti argues that in the demographically unstable period between 1680 and the mid-1700s planters depended on their wives to step into the role of plantation "master." High mortality rates, especially among husbands (typically older than wives) and children, required some widows to command plantations in order to secure wealth for future generations. Anzilotti praises these "intrepid adventurers" for their ability to play the role of "deputy husband" on the plantation and in the marketplace. Crucially, she maintains that female planters did not seek to alter the gender order, choosing rather to shore up South Carolina's racial and class hierarchies by expanding their powers to the limits possible within a patriarchal social order.

Anzilotti substantiates her claim primarily through wills, finding that husbands frequently named wives as estate executors and plantation managers until property ownership could be transferred to grown sons. Why did these temporarily powerful women, at times amounting to 10 percent of all planters, not attempt to dismantle a system that denied women first-class status? The colony's demographic uniqueness, Anzilotti argues, made the maintenance of white dominance in a "Negro country" the first priority. Nothing less than absolute control over a black population in bondage would produce the fabulous fortunes they enjoyed as members of South Carolina's planter class.

Anzilotti distinguishes her subjects from women in the Chesapeake region who turned their economic power into greater autonomy from male dominated families. Yet her evidence shows that some women used their unique situation to transmit land to daughters, granddaughters and female kin, which begs the question: Why did male planters not feel more threatened? Where are the "anxious patriarchs" found in Kathleen Brown's study of colonial Virginia?¹ She suggests that the small size of the colony's elite limited the degree to which women from this class could challenge patriarchal authority. Acting as "instruments of patriarchal preservation," they enjoyed temporary power in the interests of stabilizing a system that subordinated them as women but granted them unprecedented status and wealth as members of a white planter elite (107). Anzilotti concludes that to become a planter was "a necessary expedient, not a career option" for women (168). For this...