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Reviewed by:
  • Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America by Nancy Isenberg, and: Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–80
  • Michael D. Pierson (bio)
Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America by Nancy Isenberg. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998, 344 pp., $45.00 hardcover, $16.95 paper.
Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–80 by Marli F. Weiner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998, 308 pp., $45.95 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

Marli Weiner’s and Nancy Isenberg’s books are both concerned with the intellectual atmosphere within which nineteenth-century American women lived their lives. Both authors contend that American women in the Civil War era either seized upon existing discourses and used them to forge alliances with other women or created their own feminist responses to patriarchal ideologies. While other historians often present conservative gender ideologies as nearly hegemonic, these authors explore the ways by which women worked within their intellectual contexts to support radical re-interpretations of nineteenth-century thought and social change.

In choosing South Carolina, Weiner has a harder case to make, given the resilience of patriarchy in that state’s society. Weiner argues that plantation mistresses formed significant emotional and practical bonds with the women they enslaved far more often than most historians have credited. While recognizing that plantation mistresses exhibited a broad range of behaviors that included women who hated and beat the slaves they owned, and also the frequency with which the sexual abuse of slave women by plantation men drove wedges between women of different races, Weiner contends that the ideology of domesticity often induced white women to act on behalf of enslaved women. Weiner demarcates subtle differences between northern and southern ideologies of domesticity, yet her central point is that “benevolence and charity were the responsibility of all women, but southern women were particularly urged to turn their benevolent impulses in the direction of their slaves” (69). Because plantation mistresses most frequently came into contact with female house slaves and enslaved girls working in domestic production jobs, white women usually exercised their benevolent impulses with female slaves. Weiner’s chapters on how slave women reacted to this charity, while hampered by a lack of sources that forces her to look beyond the South Carolina focus of her study, recognize that black women might have regarded these actions as intrusive and condescending. Still, Weiner contends that they also may have seen mistresses as useful sources of supplemental food, clothing, and medical care. Even beyond that self-serving motivation, some slave women, Weiner writes, exhibited “a willingness [End Page 176] to work for whites throughout the war [that] was inspired by loyalty and the desire to comfort their mistresses” (177). Such could be the fruit of white women’s benevolence and the impact of domesticity’s powerful reach.

Weiner recognizes, of course, that her description of cross-racial alliances is not applicable to all South Carolina plantation women. As she observes, women whose husbands owned fewer people did not command the material resources necessary to offer significant charity to slaves and therefore may not have been able to establish bonds with enslaved women. Further, in the last third of Weiner’s book, she concludes that the sympathies women developed before the war evaporated during Reconstruction as mistresses often became relatively impoverished and incapable of fulfilling their roles of benevolence.

But Weiner hastily dismisses other objections that could be raised, and the book would be stronger if certain points were developed more fully. If the ideology of domesticity played a large part in women’s lives, what about the impact of racist thought? Weiner writes that mistresses “did not wield the terms of racism in the same blunt way that many male slaveholders did,” but this potentially telling point is not explored despite a footnote that indicates that the author has compared men’s and women’s private correspondence in this light (149). Equally troubling is the vague treatment of how West African conceptions of gender roles may have influenced black women’s reactions to domesticity (113–14).

Finally, day to day work relationships may have undercut the ties Weiner has found. Her first two...

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